Missing God

Our world is saturated with the Holy. It is full of God's presence. God's presence are the very waters we swim in each day, and yet every day and every week I can close each one having completely missed Him. When we realize the truth of Ephesians 4:6 that is over all, through all, and in all, there becomes a saddening reality on our part. We realize God is present everywhere, and we still miss Him entirely in the course of a day or a week.

We need what Richard Foster calls prayer of examen of consciousness. We need to recognize what Erwin McManus calls divine moments in need of seizing. We need with Brother Lawrence to practice the presence of God.

Each day is full of God's presence, and my mind and heart need to be attentive to His presence. I need to 'prayerfully reflect on the thoughts, feelings, and actions of my days to see how God has been at work among me and how I respond' to those moments.

Each day is my opportunity to be present where I am. God invites me to see and hear and respond to what is around me, and through it all, to discern the footprints of God.

What may God be doing in and through my kids today? What may God be inviting me into through the neighbor, the barista, the homeless man I come across today? What may God be teaching me or forming in me through the loss of a job, the loss of a love one, a confusing circumstance, or a relational altercation?

These are all divine moments when heaven invades earth. More specifically, these are all moments Heaven invades my world today.

I only pray and ask that I have eyes to see and ears to hear.

4 Things on God's distance and absence

There are moments in every honest believer's journey when God seems distant. It can be hard to sort out. Sometimes knowing with your mind God is omnipresent makes the sense of his absence all the more painful.

Those moments it feels as though your prayers bounce off the ceiling and walls only to return to you, we lose touch with the sense of God's intimate tenderness as we once knew. These are moments and periods of time when we ought to know a few things.

1. Every honest believer has known this place. Every believer has or will come to a point when God feels absent or distant at best. It is important off-the-bat to know you are not alone.

2. Do not assume you made this happen. Do not assume you have done something wrong to drive God away. While our sin does separate us from God, that is not always the reason for this distance. There are times when the experience of distance is simply part of the experience of limited beings attempting intimate connection with a limitless God.

3. God has the freedom to come and go. What kind of god would you have created who answers your every beck and call? What limited god would you have created who only comes and goes as you wish? If God appears at your beck and call, it is not likely the Biblical God you are relating to. God will not be formed in our image. He is free to come and go at His will; not yours.

4. The experience of absence is not the absence of experience What might God be doing with you in this time? St. John of the Cross wrote about this part of our journey, calling it "The Dark Night of the Soul". He says there are two "purifiers" at play during this time. One, you are learning not to depend on external things as proof of God's presence. We can move further within ourselves to know the truer senses of spiritual connection. The second purifier is stripping us of our interior dependence. We are forced to challenge what we really believe about the character of God. Is God truly good and loving? What things have I created in my own image to demand God to do in order for me to believe he is good or loving? These times of feeling absent or distant make me truly realize God does not have to fit in my limited understanding of goodness and love.

I am forced to let go of my stipulations and come to know the God whose love is a reckless raging fury I cannot form as I wish. Then, I can finally let go and trust.