“God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.”
He Is Present. Nearer Than You Feel
Feelings lie. That may sound harsh, but it is one of the most practically important things a follower of Jesus can understand. The feeling of God’s absence is one of the most common and most disorienting experiences in the spiritual life. You pray and the words seem to hit the ceiling. You open your Bible and the words feel flat. You go through the motions of faith and wonder sometimes quietly, sometimes with real anguish whether anyone is there. Sometimes the noise of the world gets so loud that it plays a trick on you, making Him seem absent.
The church has a name for this, the dark night of the soul. It has been experienced by some of the most mature, devoted followers of God in history. Mystics. Reformers. Missionaries. Mother Teresa wrote in her private letters of going decades without a felt sense of God’s presence, even as she served the poorest of the poor in Calcutta.
If the feeling of God’s absence could disqualify faith, it would have disqualified hers. It would disqualify most of ours. But the presence of God is not a feeling. It is a fact. David’s meditation in Psalm 139 does not say I always feel God near me. It says I cannot escape his presence. Those are very different statements. One is subjective and variable. The other is objective and constant.
God’s presence does not ebb and flow based on the quality of your quiet time or the intensity of your worship experience. He is not more present when the music is good and less present when your mind wanders. His presence is not a reward for the spiritually consistent. His presence is not what you get when you achieve greatness, his presence is what will always be with you as you go through life, achieving greatness and whatever he has willed for you.
The incarnation tells us everything we need to know about how near God is willing to come. He did not engage with our condition from a distance. He entered it. Flesh, hunger, grief, loneliness, death. Emmanuel, God with us, is not a Christmas sentiment. It is a statement about the character of a God who comes close.
On the days when you cannot feel him, he is still there. Holding what you cannot see him holding. Carrying what you would collapse under if you were truly alone.
You are not alone. Whatever it feels like, you are not alone.
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