We need to address 2 obstacles. Part 1: What if I just don’t feel God?
- “I have done my utmost to open my heart and mind to God but I just don’t experience his presence; all I get is absence and emptiness”.
2. What do we expect God to do for us in the material world?
How might we begin to respond?
To the person who just doesn’t feel God’s presence, I don’t really know what to say! Wait – but that sounds unfair to a person who has been waiting for years. Try again – but they may feel they have tried everything. Are you doing anything “wrong”? – I don’t mean that as a criticism, but perhaps you have expectations of what meeting with God will be like that get in the way? Are there obstacles in your life that are proving a block to God? Are there personality types that just find it hard? I think this is very likely. In which case, what can they do?
All I can suggest is this:
Do you want to live a life of faith because you believe in the value of it? Then stop trying to force some sort of religious experience and commit yourself to your faith. You will meet with God as and when you need to. Remember, throughout our thinking here we have focussed on our end of the experience of meeting with God and maintained a healthy agnosticism about saying for certain what God may or may not be like.
Perhaps a helpful image is C.S. Lewis’s Christ figure, the lion Aslan. This is the God who just visits us now and then, and though this is completely wrong theologically, for God is always present, it can be quite true to our experience. Jesus himself told his disciples that they will meet him along the way; in other words get on with living out the reality of the resurrection, and when you need particular strength and guidance, then God will appear to supply our needs.
Sometimes I wonder if God has “blessed” me with lots of religious experiences because I’m so needy – I need regular emotional highs to keep me going. If I was a person of stronger character and will power, perhaps I could say to myself, “Denis, you believe and trust in God; you are convinced he has called you to walk his way, then get on with it. What’s required is well within your capabilities. I know you feel like God’s a long way away at the moment, but you know that’s not true, so keep believing he’s with you until you feel his strength and guidance again”. Now that really would be living by faith! And perhaps that’s what the person who doesn’t feel God’s presence is called to do: just live by faith.
In the age of the internet, we expect a reply to our texts or emails immediately, but perhaps in practice messages from God are more like in the age of sailing ships. A reply will arrive in a few weeks or months.
Spiritual Devotion 