Growing up, I understood there were primarily three ways to encounter God:
- Through church
- Through Scripture
- Through prayer
This is not incorrect. Indeed, I would say that all of these things provide the foundational bedrock of encountering God, in the sense that doing these things establishes relationship: they open the door to holy encounter, they sharpen our faith and our understanding of who God is, they form us as people who desire God and seek after God.
But these are not the only places we encounter God. Why should they be?
In Scripture, God initiates encounter through burning bushes, through donkeys, through angelic messengers, through prophets, through His word, through responses to prayer, through visions, through dreams, through audible commands, certainly through His Son, and then through the apostles and God’s children themselves.
God initiates encounter at moments of need: for example, when His children cry out for His aid or His presence. He also initiates encounters at moments of His discretion: to call His children, to rebuke them, to send them sustenance, to show His authority, to simply be present with them.
I’ll pause here because “encounter” can be a vexed word to use about God. God is omnipresent and omnipotent; the Holy Spirit indwells in God’s children. God is therefore always present, always available. He is never not available to us; He does not leave. So I when I speak of “encounters” I don’t mean that God is out tending to something elsewhere and then returns somewhere from afar to engage with us. Rather, when I write about “encounters,” I mean those times and spaces and moments in which our eternally-present God chooses to reveal Himself to us in some particular and noticeable way.
I always encounter God through His word: it reveals who He is, it tells me what He means and intends, and we know that it acts on us in mysterious and transformative ways. I always encounter God through prayer; He always hears. I always encounter Christ through the church, where the nature of His love is revealed to me through the community of believers and also through communion.
But—God surprises us elsewhere, in ways that are easy to dismiss.
A really good latte, a slant of summer sun: all of these are testament to God’s care, to holy pleasure, to delight. And because all good things come from God, we encounter Him in all of these. Yesterday, watching a National Geographic special on Hawaii, I was staggered by the eerie beauty of manta rays and lava crickets and what their presence tells me about the creativity and the thought of God. We encounter God in a million small moments of pleasure or delight, and yet frequently never trace them to the source.
God reveals Himself to me in wise counsel from others; in resonant passages and quotes from books I care about; in opportune surprises; in special gifts. Occasionally, and rarely, He has revealed Himself in the odd and unmistakable dream, or in a thought that sounds nearly like a command and which would never have otherwise emerged from my mind.
I write this because more often than not, I forget all this in my frustration.
I pray and go to church and read the Bible and I get mad because I don’t encounter God there the way I want or expect to encounter Him. I want comfort, and I wind up opening the Bible to a chapter of Leviticus. I go to church needing a word of hope and the message is on tithing. I ask my fellow believers to pray for guidance for me and then I just hope they do because I never hear anything back affirmative or negative or otherwise.
But God is always encountering me. On the day I read Leviticus, I find comfort instead in a surprise small present from a friend. On the day I go to church needing a word of hope, I come home and find inspiration in a reread of Lord of the Rings. I ask my believing friends to pray for me; a colleague at work offers counsel I badly need. God is paying attention, and He is meeting my needs.
He just doesn’t do it always in the way that I expect.
For those of us raised in church, I think there’s a strong temptation to think we only encounter God through God things. But everything is God’s thing: all on heaven and earth is His. He uses it to encourage it, speak to us, counsel us, guide us. Just because our encounter with God isn’t coming where or how we expect doesn’t mean we’re not going to experience it.
There’s a knack, I am finding, to keeping my eyes open for God everywhere. The more I look, the more I see Him.
Just not always where I expect.
Samaritan's Song 