Living In the Presence of God

Monday morning broke cold and dreary.  Thoughts of the cold bedroom floor made it difficult to escape from the clutches of the warm blankets on my bed.  After laying there for just five more minutes, the blankets finally lost their grip.  I hopped across the hardwood floors to the cold tile of the bathroom in as few steps as possible, lighting on the rug in front of my sink.  I did not want to start the day or the week.  I quickly washed my face, threw on some clothes, and made my way upstairs to wake the kids.  From their responses, I gathered they were having the same trouble I was that morning.  As we all grumpily made our way to the school room after eating breakfast, we found it hard to be pleasant with each other.  The day proceeded this way, bickering, fighting, tattling, and me responding grumpily by disciplining everyone for everything.  By dinner time, everyone was on a razor’s edge.  We were all jumping down each other’s throats for minor offenses.  Then my precious husband called to tell me he was going to be late.  On the phone he lamented, “Traffic is backed up on Charles Blvd.  It’s going to take me an extra fifteen minutes to get home.”  Oh great!  I thought to myself, Now dinner is going to be cold!

After dinner, I hopped into the car to take my son to swim practice following the same route my husband had taken earlier that evening.  We saw the cause of the traffic jam.  A small Honda had crashed into an SUV.  Both cars were completely mangled.  Large flood lights had been set up, and fire trucks and tow trucks were working to get the road cleared.  It was a mess.  Tragedy had obviously occurred that night.  Later we learned that the Honda had crossed the center line and smashed head on into the SUV.  Both drivers were killed.  The next day it seemed every driver in Greenville had been sobered by the accident.  Cars avoided switching lanes, the speed of the traffic was noticeably slower, and everyone acted a bit more courteous.  It seemed as though we were all contemplating the deaths of the drivers and were carefully trying to avoid their fate. 

Today, after a week has passed and the obligations of life have pushed the thoughts of death out of our heads, the rush of traffic has resumed back to its hectic pace.  I tend to respond in my Christian faith in a similar fashion.  When the new year comes around, I am reminded of my need for a vital growing faith.  I make resolutions to read the Bible and pray regularly.  However, come February the excitement wears off and I find myself consumed with daily life and forget or neglect the time I had planned to spend getting to know my savior.  I don’t think God desires short-lived courteous driving or often neglected resolutions, but rather a living, active, growing relationship with Him. 

In my Bible reading this week, I came across the passage of the parable of the ten virgins who were instructed to wait for the bridegroom.  Five of the virgins were prepared with enough oil in their lamps.  However, five were not prepared and therefore were not allowed into the marriage feast.  In this parable Jesus illustrates the fact that Christians need to be prepared for Jesus’ return.  I am so tempted to respond to this passage by making sure I have my Christian to-do list in order.  Included on this list would be items like: 1. Read my Bible each day.  2. Be patient with my kids.  3.  Be loving toward my husband, and on and on it would go.  When I have tried to keep a list like this, I have invariably gotten frustrated and felt like a failure when I fell short of the items I had planned to check off.  As a result I give up the to-do list and go about living my life as usual.  When Jesus told this parable, He was not asking me to keep a spiritual checklist that would set me up for failure.  Instead He wants me to completely and totally surrender my whole life to Him, trusting Him fully, and falling more deeply in love with Him.   I love the way Ann Voskamp put it in her blog post this week.  She posted beautiful pictures of the Niagara falls, and artfully described the ice that was being chipped away by the rush of water, which caused it to go careening over the edge of the cliff.  She posted, “The way to fall in love with God is to surrender to the fall.”

Surrendering to the fall means a complete and total surrender to God’s will.  It means viewing my grumpy Mondays with thankfulness instead of bitter resentment.  Living in God’s presence means surrendering my plans to the Lord.  It means responding to any and all circumstances that He places in my life with contented thankfulness.  How thankful I am that it wasn’t my husband’s SUV that was crushed in that awful accident, but what if it had been?  Would I grieve with hope...or as one with no hope?  Is how I am responding to the cold floor, the grumpy children, and the cold dinner how I would respond to tragedy in my life?  Or am I so in tune with my maker, walking in his presence, that I would see his finger prints on even the tragic details of my life?  I want to desire a peace that passes understanding because I am basking in His presence, seeking his will, and enjoying His plans as I watch them unfold in my life.  I will only be able to attain this if I can fully come to grips with the fact that God works all things in my life together for my good (Rom. 8:28).  Oh Lord Jesus, help me to surrender to the fall.

After a lively dinner, my husband and I shooed our kids upstairs, so we could spend our coveted fifteen or twenty minutes catching up with each other. We dimmed the lights, threw the accumulated junk from the day off the couch, turned on some love songs, and flipped the gas logs on for a romantic atmosphere. I began the discussion with my frustrations over how most of my plans for the day had been interrupted by phone calls, settling disputes between the kids, and a forgotten pile of laundry that sucked me into folding it. I admitted that I felt like I had gotten nothing accomplished. My loving husband comforted me and began sharing the details of his day. He shared his thoughts on a case that had caused him trouble over the last few weeks; he mentioned frustrating exchanges that he had with clients; then he shared with me an interesting article he had come across while reading the news. He said, “Evidently, obesity is contagious.” He fired up his computer and pulled up an article written in the New England Journal of Medicine by researchers who had studied 12,067 people for over 30 years. He skimmed down the article and read, “A person’s chances of becoming obese increased by 57% if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given interval.” He went on reading, “The closeness of friendship is relevant to the spread of obesity. Persons in closer, mutual friendships have more of an effect on each other than persons in other types of friendships, increasing the chance of obesity 171%.” As we continued to read through the article we noted that the researchers suggested that many other behaviors were influenced by close mutual friendships.

In some ways, the article revealed new, helpful insights that will provide healthcare workers with tools to give to their patients who struggle with obesity. However, this thirty year study of over 12,000 people simply stated an obvious truth: The people you hang around will affect your behavior. As I Corinthians 15:33 puts it, “Do not be deceived: Bad company corrupts good morals.” As I have been reading through the Bible this year, the plan I am following has taken me through the chapters in Genesis, where God tells his chosen people to avoid contact with the Gentile nations. In some cases God tells the Israelites to utterly destroy the heathen living around them. When the Israelites refuse to listen and marry Gentile women, they inevitably end up worshiping other gods, and incurring curses instead of blessings from God.

So, if bad company corrupts good morals, and I am trying to daily live in the presence of God, how should I respond? The same truth of immersing myself in God’s Word, praying continuously, and developing close friendships with others who desire a close relationship with the Lord is the key. This truth does not give me an excuse to avoid non-Christians, or to shelter my children from the world. Jesus put it best when he said,

This truth gives me an impetus to strengthen my relationship with my savior and continue to establish solid Christian friendships so that I can be used of God to reach a hurting world. As my kids have gotten older, I am sensing a prodding from the Lord to reach out to that hurting world with them. I don’t know how this will all play out, but I am praying that God would give us opportunities to share the truth of the gospel as we reach out in tangible ways to those in need.

God desires an intimate relationship with me and you. From the very beginning of the world, God walked with Adam and Eve regularly in the garden building a close relationship with them. Adam and Eve’s sin caused a break in this intimate relationship, and this break extended to the whole human race. Instead of desiring to be in God’s presence, they felt ashamed and hid from Him (Gen. 3). God could have rejected them and the whole human race, but instead He planned a way of salvation to restore their/our relationship with Him. Throughout the Old Testament, God continually sought out his people in the middle of their sin to communicate His plans to bless them. He established a covenant with Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; a covenant reminding them of his promise to provide a savior. In His ultimate outpouring of love, God humbled himself, became a man and lived among us, so He could seek and save us (Luke 19:10; Matt 9). He then died a shameful death on the cross to provide a way of restoration and forgiveness. Jesus, God’s only son, fulfilled God’s promise of salvation, in order that we might enter his presence unashamed.

The God of the Universe loves us so much that He was willing to send His Son to die for us and to pay the penalty of our sin. He wants us to be acquainted with Him, like He is completely and fully acquainted with us!

So, how do I respond? I live my life like it all depends on me, like God does not even exist. I make my plans, set my goals and move aggressively toward them. When someone or something gets in the way, I get frustrated or angry. In response, I tweak my plans and strive even harder to attain my goals. When my plans continue to fail, I get frustrated with God for not helping me to reach my goals. Do not misunderstand me, striving for and attaining goals marks a person living in the presence of God. However, holding with clenched fists onto those goals, draws us far away from God’s presence into bitterness, anxiety, or depression.

Rather than living as if I am the ruler of my universe and responsible for my successes and failures, I want to strive toward living like I know that it all depends on God, because it does. The only way to obtain this posture is to live in God’s presence. I need a reckless abandonment of my will and a resolute confidence in God’s will. I need to follow Jesus’ example, who when confronted with the hardest task he had to face, said, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” (Luke 22:42). If I can make my life’s motto, “Not My Will, But Yours Be Done,” I will have a peace that passes understanding. I can only get there by sitting at his feet every day, basking in His greatness, soaking in His word, and fellowshipping with other believers who are striving to live in God’s presence.

Lord, give me a reckless abandonment of my will and draw me into a resolute confidence in your will, so I may dwell in your presence daily.

Over the last several months, a dull pain in my right hip had gotten steadily worse. Ibuprofen, helped me to ignore its nagging, but the pain kept returning. “I am too busy to be bothered with this,” I told myself. “I don't have two or three free hours to waste in a doctor’s office?” I rationalized. “I will suffer through,” the martyr in me decided. In my heart, I was making excuses. I did not want to be bothered with finding out the cause of the pain. Subconsciously, I think I feared the diagnosis, or felt the treatment would be too time-consuming. Over the next several months the pain increased, and eventually I made an appointment with my doctor who referred me to a physical therapist.

After a few minutes in the physical therapist’s waiting room, a slender, bright, cheery woman called me back into her office. After asking several questions, she listened intently to my symptoms, gently examined the affected area, and then confidently told me the cause of my pain: A misalignment of my hips. Without hesitation, she asked me to do a few maneuvers on the examination table. With the last maneuver, I heard three pops in my hip. When I stood back up, she asked me, “How do you feel?” Amazed, I replied, “The pain is gone!” She saw the relieved excitement on my face and warned, “This is your fix. The pain will come back, but when it does, do these three maneuvers, and you should realign your hips again. Eventually, after doing a series of exercises, you will strengthen the muscles which will hold your hips in place and get rid of the pain.” After making a follow-up appointment, I went home excited and eager to start working on the exercises she had given me.

Each morning, I awoke motivated to do my hip strengthening exercises realizing this was my ticket to a pain-free hip. When the pain returned, I performed the hip-aligning maneuvers to relieve it. With each visit, my physical therapist gave me encouragement along with new and more challenging exercises. My hips began to stay aligned with little pain. On my last visit, my physical therapist nonchalantly explained, “To keep your hip aligned you need to do these exercises for the rest of your life.” “I don’t know if I can maintain this enthusiasm about these exercises for the rest of my life.” I told her. Her response took me back, “You will if the pain comes back.” The returning pain would be my reminder to keep up the exercises.

The way that I reluctantly made a doctor’s appointment to determine the cause of the pain in my hip is how I so often deal with the pain of sin in my life. I try to ignore it or make excuses or rationalize away my sin. When I am impatient with my kids, or angry with my husband, or irritable because life is not going the way I think it should, I treat my sin with a little “pain medicine.” I lie to myself, making excuses, blaming others for my sin. It’s PMS, I tell myself. It’s disobedient children or a selfish husband, I rationalize. When the pain of my sin gets too difficult to bear, and I make an "appointment" with my heavenly father, He eagerly invites me in. He listens carefully to my problems and diagnosis my sin. With his forgiveness, my pain goes away.

The exercises God gives me include regularly reading the Bible, praying continuously, and fellowshipping with other believers.  When I begin to struggle with sin, I am reminded of my constant need to be in fellowship with my Savior.  The sin will always be in my life, but He gives me the means to keep it at bay. I want to approach my relationship with God in the same way I am approaching the pain in my hip, with diligence and with the belief that straying from his Word will have a similar effect that the misalignment had on my hip: much unnecessary pain.

After spending a whirlwind of a week preparing for my 14 year old son's unexpected surgery on his leg, our family was forced for the next two weeks to bring a halt to our busy lives and spend time with each other.  This relaxed schedule compelled me to reflect on how my harried schedule had taken my focus away from being in the presence of God and had unintentionally placed me into a hectic lifestyle where I constantly rushed from one task to the next.  I had over-committed and over-scheduled to the point where I felt the need to rush through my daily quiet times or neglect them altogether so I could begin checking the tasks off my list.  When I did have a break during the day I felt more eager to get acquainted with long lost friends on Facebook then I did discovering new truths about my Savior.  Getting messages on email, Facebook, or my phone held more excitement for me than connecting with the living God.  My kids and husband often found me easily frustrated, irritable, and more interested in getting them to do tasks than helping them to navigate their way through the day. 

The unexpected surgery brought more than just healing to my son's leg.  It gave me more time to reflect on God's word which gave me a greater awareness of how far I had drifted from his presence.  In an attempt to daily focus on living in God's presence, I decided to begin blogging about the things I am learning by studying God's word and memorizing scripture.  Hopefully, my journal entries will be a log recounting the truths I discover, a loving heavenly father I encounter, the failings I confess, and the triumphs for which I can give God the glory.

Until next time,

Sandy

Two resources I plan to use this year: 
Weekly Bible Memory Verse
Read Through the Bible in a Year