Relational God

How often do I check in with God during my day? I pray regularly, read the Bible inside and outside class, and I do my best to get to Church every Sunday. After spending time learning about the Spiritual Disciplines (ie. Prayer, solitude, meditation, etc.), I realize that our God is more relational than traditional. He wants to spend time with us.  Nevertheless, how often do I just sit and spend time communing with God? How often to I try to listen to His voice, meditate on His face, or talk over the things going on in my life? I have to admit, communing with God is something that I often have to schedule in because I never feel like there is enough time. The sad part is, I don’t think that I have the right to try to schedule God in whenever it is convenient for me. God is an ever present force in our lives, and we should be going by His schedule not our own. After all, He created us, not the other way around. So why do I have such a hard time sitting down and communing? Sitting down in fellowship with my King?

This isn’t an easy question for anyone to answer, but I realize that yes, communion with the Lord does take a little bit of scheduling on our part. We have to make TIME to sit down with Him. As with any friendship, we have to find the time to be together, but going a little deeper, I personally have a hard time stilling myself mentally and physically. We live in a fast paced society that tells us that every minute of every day we need to be moving, doing, and getting things done. So much to do, so little time. While it is good to get things done, and it is good to finish our projects, I have been realizing that by always going, I rarely rest. I rarely give myself the chance to sit down, take a breather, and enjoy the company of God. While I’m not entirely sure as to why I feel like I always have to be doing, I realize that part of the problem is the culture that we live in that refuses to take a break. Most cities never sleep, and most of us, keep chugging away with little thought to the fact that in order to bring glory to His Kingdom, we have to spend quality time with our King.

This week (or I should say weekend), we enjoyed lectures on the Spiritual Disciplines, and even put a couple of them into practice. Our first time of simply spending time with God was asking God, “What do you think about me?” I was sitting on a bench, under a tree and felt a huge disconnect (this was after about 20 minutes of sitting). Everything within me felt like giving up, but I realized this was about practice not about getting a message and moving on. So, I asked God to open my heart and sat a little bit longer. After a couple of minutes, I looked over at the tree I was sitting under and I felt like I should climb it. I honestly haven’t climbed a tree in about 12 years, so I had to question if I should seriously climb the tree. After a couple of seconds I realized that sitting on the bench really wasn’t working anyway, so even if nothing happened in the tree, I wasn’t missing much on the ground. I climbed the tree. Once I got a good 15 or 20 feet up, I said, “Well, God, you got me into the tree, what now?”

As I was sitting in the tree, I looked down, and I saw how far up I was from the ground and my backpack, which was still sitting under the tree where I left it. It was in that moment that I had to question, why I wasn’t afraid to fall when I was sitting in the tree. The fact of the matter is, when you climb a tree (or anything) your entire weight is being supported by something other than you. I was leaning on a branch that if it broke would leave me helpless to falling and at best breaking a limb. The fact of the matter is, I couldn’t protect myself if I were to fall, but despite this knowledge, I still felt safe standing in the tree. Then, I felt God saying that none of us is strong enough to protect ourselves. We all need to lean on something or Someone in order to be safe at times; and that is okay. I felt the Lord tell me that He always wants me to feel safe when approaching Him, and that it is okay to feel vulnerable. Being strong doesn’t mean that I have to be strong for everyone else. It means that I can be strong enough to be broken as well.

I know that most of you have never seen me cry, which isn’t that unusual since I am not an overly emotional person. Part of this is because of who I am, but I think that much of our society believes that tears are a sign of weakness. It is only now that I am realizing that it takes even more strength to allow people to see our vulnerability than it does to be strong all the time.

Yesterday, we were asked to go around the room and say positive words about each other. The first word that multiple people said was ‘strong.’ It struck me as an interesting thing that I can be viewed as strong by these people who have seen me cry more than anyone else. Still, they see strength. I think the more I open up, the stronger I get. I hope the same for all of you.