Where is God?
I have wondered this to myself—absurdly, as though God is a thing that can somehow be lost, or left behind in the couch cushions, or otherwise have disappeared from view. The fact of omnipresence thwarts me. Okay, okay. What I mean is—
I don’t have this sense that God is present.
Closer, maybe. Also not entirely true. I have evidence He’s present in my own life and breath. I don’t feel fuzzy God-feelings, but I also know that God can be present and close to me while my feelings are in complete antithetical riot. Maybe what I am really trying to say is—
I don’t know how to look for Him.
I thought I did. I’d pray a lot and then wait. If nothing immediately moved in the ether or in my life I’d pray myself sick. Except I wasn’t praying to draw closer to God so much as I was to force him to action, my petitions a spiritual alarm clock to draw Him out of what I imagined to be slumber (in the back of the figurative boat, no less): “I have faith, so much faith, cool cool, but also, God, there is a lot happening out here, and I wish you would pay attention.”
And, you know, I’d search Scripture too. Which worked for a long time—that “right verse” fell out of the sky a lot in my teen and college years—until it didn’t. Screeching out the cries of my heart I’d open the Bible expecting God to offer a fitting reply, and find myself staring blankly at a chapter of Leviticus. Or a Psalm that seemed bizarrely out of context. Or genealogy.
I’d also divine meaning from whatever I had to hand. A sample from my college days: the boy I have a crush on sat down next to me, so God clearly wants me to confess my feelings! Or: I have a bad feeling in my stomach about this trip, so God must not want me to go!
Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps more discernment is required.
All of this led, more of less, to this implicit understanding I had of God as deeply loving but also somehow taciturn, over the years. I encountered God often in the places I expected Him—in praise, in church, in community—but outside of those places my encounters with Him seemed more rare than not. The Jesus who talked so easily with the disciples, with whom people wanted to go to dinner, fit in far more easily to his Biblical context than into my modern one, as much as I tried to imagine Him there.
He who has ears to hear, let him hear, God says. Except fundamentally, I think my issue has been that I didn’t entirely trust mine.
That’s because I was schooled growing up—rightly so—in the importance of discernment. In understanding the very real danger of projecting our own desires, feelings, and motives onto God. We cannot solely trust ourselves. We cannot fall to the temptation to settle on whatever feels “right” or “good” and name it holy, pretending our own wants are divinely inspired. This is, to be clear, a very real danger. Discernment is critical.
But we also must acknowledge that God reveals Himself to us in different ways, from person to person, and that with discernment it is almost always possible to hear Him speaking—embarrassingly so, now that I have tuned myself into it.
I don’t know what it looks like for you. But for me, it looks like this:
An insistent thought that won’t leave and does not seem to have emerged from anywhere in particular: a fragment of verse or song, the name of a book that compels me to open it up, a certain phrase. Sometimes these insistent thoughts turn out to be reminders of relevant spiritual truth. Often, I find them to be minor reorientations: God’s way of turning my face toward what I ought to be looking at when my gaze is fixed worriedly on something else.
A sense of wonder, delight, effervescent joy out of nowhere. For me this happens frequently in nature, or often when I’m engaged in the arts some way. Fizzy joy, I’ve come to call it, the bubble-burst of right time right place right everything yes, deep contentment and enjoyment just in bearing witness or being. A sense of magic in being human that feels like God saying look what I made, look what I made, and because I Am it is still good.
A sense of calm, patient, absolutely unyielding presence. These are the rare times it feels like if I turned the right way I could see God—as though He was right over my shoulder. Most recently I felt it during my mother’s illness, when I stood on a corner of my suburb in tears venting my spleen. I knew who I was venting to and I had the distinct sense I was being heard and the being-heard was itself healing, as though God was willing to wait as long as I needed to drain the wound.
The love of God through the love of others. The phone call at the right time, the squeeze of a hand, the warm conversation. All gifts—the hands and feet of Christ that I frequently forget to see in that light.
An image—and I usually do not encounter God through clear mental images—of the Suffering Christ in grief. This experience preceded my mother’s death, and changed me so profoundly that I can’t look back on it without remembering it and what it meant.
What I’m trying to say is: don’t stop looking.
Maybe God does reveal Himself to you in images. Or through a particular book passage, or the words of a wise friend, or the way the light falls through the trees. Maybe through the fact that you woke up today free of the soreness that usually plagues you, or the gentle tug of unease that means you haven’t done what needs to be done. If you don’t sense Him speaking to you immediately through prayer and Scripture, look elsewhere. And you’ll know it’s God when what is spoken and revealed is in accordance with what we know of Him; when it dovetails with what is true.
We have to learn to listen. We have to learn to see. Sometimes that means acknowledging that we place God in very particular boxes and expect to encounter Him only during “holy” experiences – but that He is available to us wherever we are, if we’re paying the right sort of attention.
Samaritan's Song 