Presence

"A loving Personality dominates the Bible, walking among the trees of the garden and breathing fragrance over every scene. Always a living Person in present, speaking, pleading, loving, working, and manifesting himself whenever and wherever His people have the receptivity necessary to receive the manifestation."

A.W. Tozer

The Pursuit of God

There are a few things that have become more apparent to me as I have gotten older. One is that I don't know as much as I think I do, and the other is that I desperately need God. I need to experience him in more than an intellectual way. I need to know him as a father, as a brother, as a friend. I need to find my self in his presence, not simply viewing the brilliance of his glory through through a veil of self imposed distance. It is immensely easier to be contented with such a distance when there are so many noble things to fill it. I have always been a runner. By that I mean someone who runs to one thing or another, to one friend or family member to share my pains with, my joys, my thoughts, desires, and burdens. I seldom find my place of rest in the presence of God. When trouble strikes, when pain pierces my heart, when a burden comes that I cannot carry on my own I am all too quick to pick up the phone and call a friend, to escape in some activity or company of people, to busy myself so as to forget or to postpone. Being here, away from all the common comforts and pleasant distractions of my "normal" life, has only made it unavoidably evident that when it comes down to it, it really is just me and God. As I walked home from the train station the other day I started to cry. The ironic thing is that I had just gotten back from a great weekend with a youth group I work with. However, as I walked home by myself and in the quite of my own thoughts a sense of being completely alone came over me. I wanted to grab my cell phone and call a friend to reassure myself this was not true and to set my mind at ease, but I realized that with all of my good friends being across the Atlantic Ocean that this was not an option. So I kept walking, wiping tears, and avoiding eye contact with passers by. I prayed. I prayed with more honesty than I have in a long time. I prayed to God as if  he was my friend on the line. Not with eloquence or with well phrased requests and adoration, but with simplicity and honest pleas. I have always been drawn to the Psalms because of the way they portray and express unhindered human emotion and experience. I mean, the psalmist was one messed up and confused man, crying out to God and asking why he has forgotten him in one breath and in the next praising God for his abundant goodness and proclaiming the great deeds of the Lord. But aren't we all like this? Grasping for God and yet at the same time cursing him for his supposed distance or distraction from us, form our needs. I want to pray to God as the psalmist does, with shocking confidence and vulnerability. He does not hold back, he doesn't pretend, he doesn't reserve his prayers for only praise but for confession, for admitting his great doubt and need, for honestly laying his most painful experiences of his heart before God. The psalmist doesn't offend God with this vulnerability, he confesses his belief in his presence in his nearness to his need. He cries out to God knowing that he is not crying out in vain, his cries are expressions of trust, expressions of utter recognition that God is among him, within him, near to him, intertwining himself in our deepest desires, pain, and burdens. Intellectually I know this is true of God myself. I know that he is forever present and intimately aquatinted with all of me, but I don't act this way. I act as if I need something more, as if God were distant and uninterested, incapable of meeting my needs or untrustworthy with my pain and supplications. The reality is that I will always treat God as distant as long as I accept him intellectually but refuse a relationship with him that is experiential. In other words, I must experience God. I must experience his presence and simply know that he is there. A.W. Tozer writes, "God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful that He can , without anything other than himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is. " This is what first drew me to God and this truth is what must sustain me in my relationship with him. I regret that the only thing standing between me and the presence of God is my own self living on unrepentant and uncruicified, to steal the words of Tozer. Coming into the presence of God requires a coming out from behind the veil of ourselves, but the death of self is painful. I think what I am experiencing here is a little bit of this death. Though I am resistant and I complain whole heartedly for having to go through it, it is a death that I cannot escape. It seems impossible to be here and refuse to be in the reality that I can experience God's presence. God is a knowable God, a God that has always chosen to be present among us, to be aquatinted with our sorrows, to know fully the pull of temptation. After all, was Jesus not Emmanuel, God with us, the Word that dwelt among us? God "is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:27-28). If only I would realize how truly present God is. What difference that would make.