I've found that if I want to connect with God there are a couple of things I first have to do. Number one, I have to come into his presence with praise. It puts me in the right frame of mind to hear God and helps me realign myself correctly with Him.
During the day I tend to elevate myself. Then I find that I've raised myself much higher than I ought to be. :o) So, when I praise him through music I am restored to my proper place of submission before HIM. This, in turn, leads me to see my sin appropriately, thereby leading me to the second thing I need to do, which is confess my sins to Jesus. Once cleansed I can hear him, draw near to him, be changed by him and glory in HIM. IE. Bask in his presence.
I've also been reading a book by John Ortberg called God is closer than you think. I have found several nuggets of gold just in the first few chapters that I'd like to share. In fact, much of what I want to share comes from here on out stems from this book. So in an effort to avoid plagiarizing, I'm putting his ideas and words in blue.
I don't know if you ever feel that God/Jesus is distant but I've had several seasons when I've felt like I couldn't find him anywhere. Sometimes it has been caused by a lack of obedience and at other times from unconfessed sin. Sometimes, I believe, God has withdrawn from me to see how I'd react. A testing of sorts.
Anyway, Ortberg says there are times when God is like Waldo--you know, as in Where's Waldo? The children's book with the guy who is hiding on the pages. At first he's really easy to find and as you go further into the book it gets more and more challenging to locate him. Ortberg states, "St. John of the Cross wrote that often when someone first becomes a Christian God fills them with a desire to seek him: They want to read Scripture, they are eager to pray, they are filled with a desire to serve. These characteristics are, in a sense, gifts from God to get them moving; a kind of spiritual starter kit. After a while, John of the Cross said, this initial eagerness wears off. God takes away the props so that we can begin to grow true devotion that is strong enough to carry on even when unaided by emotions."
(This is paraphrased from his book) He also says that we have to be watchful for spiritual habituation. This is when we simply drift into acceptance of life in spiritual maintenance mode. We have a kind of spiritual attention deficit disorder. When life is on spiritual autopilot, rivers of living water do not flow through it with energy and joy. Instead it looks like this:
--I yell at my children.
--I worry too much about money or my job.
--I get jealous of people more successful or attractive than I.
--I use deception to get out of trouble.
--I pass judgement on people, often when I am secretly jealous of them.
So why isn't everyday a rainbow day? Why isn't there something extraordinary everyday? Perhaps its because God wants us to learn to see him in the ordinary rather than be dependent on the extraordinary. Maybe it's because if God regularly satisfied our demand for special effects it would be like a mother who inadvertently trains her children to pay attention only when she raises her voice. (I can relate to this cause I have done this with my kids. LOL) They can tune you out easily. But when you try to whisper something to your spouse, the kids miraculously gain the ability to hear these words three rooms down and two closed doors away. Maybe the reason God lowers his voice is so we will learn to pay attention. Ortberg quotes William Barry, "Whether we are aware of it or not, at every moment of our existence we are encountering God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is trying to catch our attention, trying to draw us into a reciprocal conscious relationship." Perhaps our capacity to pay attention to God--like the capacity to lift weights or speak Spanish--only gets stronger when it gets exercised.
Another nugget I wanted to share is that sometimes we don't sense God in our lives because we go into spiritual hiding. In the same way a child will ask us to turn around and not look at them when they want to do something wrong, we too go into spiritual hiding.
Dallas Willard writes about a two-and-a-half-year-old girl who discovered how to make mud or warm chocolate as she called it. The grandmother who had been reading and facing away from the action, finds her, cleans her up and tells the little girl not to make any more "chocolate" and turns her chair around to face her granddaughter. As the grandmother goes back to reading the little girl soon resumes making her "warm chocolate" after sweetly requesting, "Don't look at me, Nana. Okay?" Then Willard writes, "Thus the tender soul of a little of a child shows us how necessary it is to us that we be unobserved in our wrong."
Anytime we choose to do wrong or to withhold doing right, we choose hiddenness as well. It may be that out of all the prayers that are ever spoken, the most common one--the quietest one, the one that we least acknowledge making --is simply this: Don't look at me, God. It was the first prayer spoken after the Fall. God came to walk in the Garden, to be with the man and the woman, and called, "Where are you?" and "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid,... so I hid" was their response. Examples of this would be:
*An executive who's going to pad an expense account
*An employee who is going to deliberately make a coworker look bad
*A student who looks at somebody else's paper during an exam
*A church member who looks forward to the chance to gossip (disguised as a prayer request)
or a personal one:
*Going to the candy jar and eating another chocolate when I know I'm crossing over into the sin of gluttony
"Don't look at me, God"
After a while this prayer can become so ingrained that we're not even aware of it. Sin always has the consequence of damaging our ability to perceive God in the present moment. As soon as I choose to sin--no matter how small--my capacity to experience God is diminished. As long as I try to maintain the lie a strange dynamic is at work in my spirit. I have to work up anger, hurt, and pride to justify my deceit. But as soon as I take on the mantle of humility and truth, I can confess my deceit and come out of hiding. "Waldo" is once again able to be seen on the page.
Ortberg suggests, on the days when God seems as though he's gone AWOL, His hidden-ness means He is up to something. That the period of uncertainty is a unique opportunity for growth. That a kind of strength is formed in our souls that would never get formed if there were an easy answer, an easy way out, or a God that is easy to find at all times. He likens it to two football teams going to the Superbowl. If they new what the outcome were going to be ahead of time it would be hard to get the adrenaline flowing. Who'd want to play? The uncertainty is essential to the game. You've got to have the hope that you could win to even enter into the game. Or else why even try? Thomas Merton once said that if you find God with great ease, perhaps it is not God that you have found.
I personally would liken it to muscle and bone. If you don't have muscle pulling on the bone, the bone doesn't remain strong. As we get older we loose muscle mass, thereby loosing bone density. If you don't use it you'll loose it. By hiding himself God causes our spiritual muscles to work as we seek Him. Spiritual growth can then occur.
One more thing about GOD's hiddenness:
Ortberg states, "People driving behind a police car don't speed--not always because their hearts are right, but because they don't want to get pulled over. God wants to be know, but not in a way that overwhelms us, that takes away the possibility of love freely chosen."
Meister Eckhart said, "God is like a person who clears his throat while hiding and so gives himself away." I love this quote from Eckhart because I can so relate to it. When we put our daughter to bed she loves to hide under the covers and pretend to be a cat or a snake or something. She LOVES for us to come in and say, "Now were is that little girl? Oh my, what is this under the covers. A cat? A Snake?" All the while she is giggling like crazy. She loves to play hide and seek. But it isn't any fun if the seeker can't find the hider. Nor is it any fun if the hider doesn't get found. It's a symbiotic game only worth playing if both parties are being rewarded.
So, where's Waldo? You never know where he'll turn up, or who he'll speak through, or what unlikely scenario he'll use for his purpose. After the resurrection, Mary Magdalene was looking right at Jesus but thought he was the landscaping service guy. God is often present, the Bible says, but apparently he often shows up in unexpected ways. He travels incognito. He is the master of disguise.
And again I ask, "Where's Waldo?
The answer? He's right around the corner. Right where you'd least expect him. Probably in the ordinary.
