I Just Can't Feel God

There are times you just can’t sense God. This can range from quietly discouraging to absolutely maddening. If I were preaching right now, I’d ask, “Can I get an amen?!” And I’d get one. Some describe God as “Deus Absconditus. ” That’s Latin for: “The hidden God” or “The unknowable God.” Is God hiding? Is there anything to be done in a spiritual desert? Before we answer those questions, first let’s talk about pregnant women.

Perhaps God is speaking to us and we just don’t have ears to hear?

That’s right. Pregnant women. In this case, I’m talking about the “I didn’t know I was pregnant until it was time to push” kind of women. If you didn’t already know, this is a very real thing. In fact, there are enough cases of this happening that there’s actually a TV show aptly titled: I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant. These women were experiencing a profound change to their bodies. Hormones, organ location, hip width, energy levels, weight, etc. - all changing. They had symptoms of being pregnant (‘cause they were!)– and they chalked it all up to a bad reaction to Doritos or something.

All the meanwhile, a life was growing inside of them.

We judge these women, saying “How could they not know?!”

However, I wonder, are we the same? Perhaps God is speaking to us and we just don’t have ears to hear?

Maybe life is growing inside of us, and we are connecting with Him… but we are just not acknowledging He’s here?

Ways We Can Feel His Presence

Now there are obvious ways like reading the Bible and prayer. But how about others like:

Exercising? I find that if I’m open to it, I hear the gentle hum of the Father’s voice in the clomp-clomp of my Nikes pounding the pavement. The endorphins get going, I’m in fresh air, I’m not sitting in front of a screen and God just seems more “here.” On another note, some may feel God during exercise because prayer actually becomes vital - “Dear (pant pant) God! I think (gasp) I’m dying! Please help me get up this hill!”

How about nature? Who doesn’t get a sense of “the Beyond” when taking a walk in the woods or watching waves crash the shore?

How about art (Ludovcio Einaudi? Sufjan Stevens? Coltrane?), conversation with good friends, food, coffee, gardening, sermons, service, all the good gifts of life…perhaps even the hard aspects of life?

When I can’t clearly hear Him through the Word, I remember He gave me taste buds. And I grill a steak and say “Thank you.”

In other words, what if we took the pressure off ourselves to hear God only speaking to us in one or two ways and started hearing Him whisper to us in all ways? And as we practice this new way of listening to God, what if we began to hone in on the one or two areas He speaks to us most clearly and be intentional with those things more often?

In each and every circumstance, God is humming to us, hoping we pick up on His tune. May we have ears to hear.

For further reading check out John Ortberg’s book, God Is Closer Than You Think.