Many people want to “see” God, experience God. But the “seeing”, the experience, eludes them. How then do we see God when our best efforts seem to leave us “without”, searching within what appears to b a vacuum?
To start, God simply “is.” That means that God is something we awaken to vs. journey to. We can often fall into the belief that certain actions will inevitably lead us to the experience of God. I have not found that to be true. My understanding is that we do those “actions’ – be they prayer, reading, meditation, service, worship – so that we are awake when God shows up. They do not create the experience. They do however ensure that we are awake enough to know when the experience arrives.
Secondly, God’s presence is most often not of the “clouds parting” “trumpet blaring” variety. The experiences tend to be far more gentle. One author compared God’s voice to being as quiet as the beating of our own heart (Try listening to your heart beating to get an idea of what that means). While some individuals do experience the granduer of God in dramatic fashion – i.e. Martin Luther, Emanuel Swedenborg, Bill Wilson – most of us experience God in more muted yet not any less powerful ways. That is why perhaps Jesus spoke of the presence of the Divine as the spirit, a word that can be translated “wind.”
One author’s point is one I have been thinking a great deal about recently. Her perspective grew out of a endless prayers for the experience of Divine. What she came to realize was that God’s answer to her longing was her longing. It was that love, that compassion, that “pull” in her heart that bore great fruit in her life, a “pull” that might have moved her more in her life than any dramatic presentation of God.
If the pull to experience God is moving you forward in your life, that might just be the whole point. That might just be the mercy and compassion of God at work in your life. Stay awake. Keep doing the work. God will show Himself in the ways He knows to be most important in light of goals that are eternal, not temporal. Those are not often the most dramatic but they are the most transformative.