“If you don’t feel close to God, guess who moved?” this has been said to me several times in my life and yes, since our accident as well (thankfully it was a stranger) and it always irritated me a bit because it seemed to me all my life I was searching for God and couldn’t find Him. It felt like He had moved or hidden or something. Then I found this verse: 2 Chronicles 32:31b “God withdrew from Hezekiah in order to test him and to see what was really in his heart.”  So God moves away from people? And yet Psalms 139:7-8 says, “I can never escape from your Spirit! I can never get away from your presence!  If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I go down to the grave, you are there.” So how in the world does that work? We can’t get away from God but He can withdraw from us? Or is it more about where my heart is and what I am aware of?  Could it be that when I don’t feel close to God that I am not aware of His presence? That I have not awakened my heart to Him, to His love? Or maybe I purposely or intentionally closed my heart in my pain and hurt. When I’m in pain and/or grieving, I tend to withdraw from people, to close my heart. And at times it feels like the pain is too overwhelming that God is far away. And maybe too, I’m angry at God for allowing this pain, this shattered dream. And God doesn’t feel like a safe God to be open with and to be pursuing Him. So why would I want to draw close to Him? Maybe I need a new or better picture of Who God is.

    One way I’ve learned to dance in the storm is that I need to choose to open my heart, to awaken myself to God’s presence. He is present and He makes His presence known to me in unique, personal ways if only I am willing to be aware of Him. But how do I open my heart when God doesn’t feel safe? How do I “see” God in my situation? I have chosen to believe that God is good not necessarily safe. If I as a human, as a mother, love my children deeply and hurt when they do or when bad things happen to them and want the best for them, how much more would God feel the same towards me? He is the perfect Father. He knows what I need. He has my best interest at heart. And I think too we blame God for a lot of things that He isn’t guilty for. A lot of our shattered dreams are a result of this broken world we live in. We are living in a world God never intended for us. Also I have asked God to help my heart be sensitive to His presence, to see Him in the storm. Jeremiah 29:11 says, “If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me.” All those years I thought I was searching for God, I wonder what it was I was searching for. I wonder if it wasn’t more about what I could get from Him than how I could bring glory to Him. If I do and say all the right things and obey all the right rules I’ll be a pretty good Christian and maybe, just maybe, my mansion in heaven will be nicer than most. And maybe God will really bless me and life will be relatively easy. So maybe I had a wrong perception of seeking God, of seeing God. Maybe I didn’t really truly want to find God because my idea of Him was He wasn’t a safe God much less a good one.

     So where is God? I believe He’s right here beside me, actually He is inside of me because I ask Him to live in my heart. So if I am willing to look under all that pain and other junk in my heart and allow God to heal my heart, I will find Him. He is a good, good Father and He loves me, as Chris Tomlin’s song says.