Steeping in the Presence of God

When Satan says God is absent, we can steep ourselves in the truth of God's presence.

Aug 27, 2022

God in the Quiet

Two amber lights glow in the early morning dark that hovers around our family room. The light seems to whisper to the corners and angles of the window trim, accenting the detail before the wild sun covers it over for the day. Children’s books sleep slanted on a bottom shelf, resting on a basket as a boulder. The two potted plants on the top shelf are silent, but still growing, still living. They soak in tiny amounts of water through their sleeping tertiary roots and release vapor into the air through the stomata on the undersides of their leaves. I don’t hear any of this happening. I don’t see it, either. But it’s happening. God is here—behind the vapor and the photons and the shadows. Beyond the senses, he is here . . . speaking himself.

There’s a gold and black globe resting on the top of a hutch that belonged to my wife’s grandparents. From where I sit in the corner of the room, the light is moving just over South America. What’s happening there, on that other continent, right now? I have absolutely no idea. But God is there. He spoke everything I see and don’t see into existence, and in that speech, in the simple making, he is present. His creation whispers it, in some mysterious tongue of telos, of purpose—the lights and the books and the basket, the black globe and the old hutch. Everything I see might as well nod and say, “Mmmhmm. His eternal power and divine nature (Rom. 1:20) . . . Do you get it?”

Sometimes I want to say out loud, “No, I don’t.” But the grace and patience of God tells me that my perception isn’t the thing at stake here. The truth is at stake, the personhood of God present in the room, and that truth, flowering in the great Word of truth, is thick and strong as mountain roots. God always waits for me to catch up, like a father ten feet ahead of his toddler on the beach. I’ll get there. And he’ll stay until I do. And even if I don’t get there, he’ll stay. He can’t do otherwise than be who he is, than be everywhere.

I need to take the truth of God’s presence, the bedrock notion that he’s here, right now, and sit on it. This is where I need to rest. But it’s more than that. It’s not just a platitude, an idea I touch down on when I feel curious or awed or unsettled. No—I don’t think I need to sit on it; I think I need to steep in it, like crushed tea leaves in boiling water, letting out their scent and flavor in the water’s embrace. I need to be tea leaves. I need to steep my soul in the Spirit of truth, letting it infiltrate every pore and crevice.

Confronting vs. Affecting

That all sounds good and poetic, but what does it really mean? It means I need to walk into a room and greet him first, because he was there before I was. As we’ve seen, God is so great and spiritually broad-backed, and we’re so blinded by the great lie, that we really think we’re the first one in the room. We never are. Say it again, and let it sink in. I’m never the first one in the room. I’m never the first one in my office, the first one in a field, the first one on the edge of the garden, where the white peonies are bowing their heavy heads in worship. I’m never the first. Never.

Steeping in the presence of God in this way means that I let the truth not simply confront me but affect me. I let myself respond to the Spirit of truth. When something confronts us, like a stranger on the street, it puts itself in our path. We have to acknowledge it, give an awkward greeting, at least. But when something affects us, it gets under our skin. It swims in our blood. It changes how we meet the world. We have to respond somehow.

I love Annie Dillard’s prose. It’s meditative, sharply observant, and spiritually alert. In her Pulitzer prize winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she observes many things in the wild world around her. These observations shape and invigorate her. Look at how she describes watching muskrats, for instance. Look at how this affects her.

It was late dusk; I was driving home from a visit with friends. Just on the off chance I parked quietly by the creek, walked out on the narrow bridge over the shallows, and looked upstream. Someday, I had been telling myself for weeks, someday a muskrat is going to swim right through that channel in the cattails, and I am going to see it. That is precisely what happened. I looked up into the channel for a muskrat, and there it came, swimming right toward me. Knock; seek; ask. It seemed to swim with a side-to-side, sculling motion of its vertically flattened tail. It looked bigger than the upside-down muskrat, and its face more reddish. In its mouth it clasped a twig of tulip tree. One thing amazed me: it swam right down the middle of the creek. I thought it would hide in the brush along the edge; instead, it plied the waters as obviously as an aquaplane. I could just look and look.
But I was standing on the bridge, not sitting, and it saw me. It changed its course, veered towards the bank, and disappeared behind an indentation in the rushy shoreline. I felt a rush of such pure energy. I thought I would not need to breathe for days.[1]

I want to steep in God’s presence the way Annie Dillard watches muskrats. I want God’s presence to change me, to make me feel as if simply being aware of him seems more precious than breathing. I want God’s presence to affect me. Don’t you?

Now, steeping in the truth is very different from sensing the truth as an idea. We’re good at the latter but not so skilled with the former. We rush. We hurry. And hurry is a form of violence on the soul.[2]

It’s not enough to give a head-nod to God’s omnipresence. It needs to affect us, not just confront us.

Always in the Room

How do we do this? How do we respond to God’s presence? I’ll leave you with just one concrete approach. To make something concrete, you have to see it incarnate in your surroundings. It’s not enough for God to be present in an Italian countryside (unless you happen to be living in the Italian countryside right now). He has to be present in your kitchen, near that spot by the oven where grape jelly clings to the grain of the wood floor.

On a practical level, I think of this as the simple truth I’ve often repeated: God is always in the room. Conceptually, we know this is true, but we seldom think about it, let alone have it influence our behavior. In the terms used earlier, we receive the Word of truth, but we haven’t let the Spirit of the truth apply it. But consider what happens when we do.

An Example

It’s 4:00am. The hum of my daughter’s sound machine fills the air with white noise. My eyes are open, blinking in the dark as I stare at the silhouettes of unicorns and computer-paper crayon drawings on the wall. In our family, sleep has been a game of musical chairs lately. Our youngest moves to mom and dad’s bed; dad moves into her bed to keep the other one company. It’s not so common for me to wake up where I actually went to sleep. In this stage of life, I’m a nightly nomad.

As I stare at the walls, I’m thinking of my father’s little sister, who just found out she has cancer. Her brother, my dad, passed from cancer in 2004. My life’s definition for the word shatter is watching him die in front of me on that surreal night in June. My godfather, a seasoned Christian counselor and my father’s best friend, says that my anxiety disorder (nearly fifteen years old and still going strong) may well have been a PTSD response to that very night.[6]Learning of my aunt’s cancer is bringing up baggage I thought I’d dealt with already. But we’re never really finished dealing with things in the way we imagine, are we?

As I’m praying for her—that the peace of God would wash over her and renew her spirit in the face of mortality—I’m realizing that my fear of death, of ending, isn’t dead yet. I’d ignored it long enough to imagine it was gone and buried. And here it was, dancing in the dark of my daughter’s room as I tried (unsuccessfully) to go back to sleep.

And then it dawned on me that God wasn’t just able to see my thoughts from afar (Ps. 139:2), to watch the swirling chaos of ambition, hope, love, passion, fear, and envy break through my consciousness a few days before Halloween in 2021; he was also here. He was in the room, just as he’s in the room right now as I write this. I can’t see him. I can only see the shadows and lines of light marking the wall as the dazing applause of the sound machine drifts down the hallway. The great lie is always hovering over my spirit like a cloud, enticing me in shadows to believe that God isn’t really here, that it’s just me wandering through my own insecurities and fears of death, rummaging through a thousand memories of my dad and my aunt, staring at the strange truth that things don’t go on forever, that there is something called an end.

I identify the lie more easily these days, which I like to think ticks the devil off. (I’m happy to tick off the one partially responsible for bringing cancer into this world.) And so I start to pray, assuming that God really is here, in this room.

God, please give my aunt peace and courage that transcends her.
Fill her with a light of hope that refuses to go out.
May the pain of this lead her ever deeper into your love,
Ever deeper into the beauty of how all of life is a gift,
And that gift gets unwrapped moment by moment.
Help me, as well, as I confront once more the fear of death.
I can feel the devil discouraging me with disbelief.
He is a liar. He wants me to be hopeless.
By your Spirit, I will never be hopeless.
Father, keep conforming me to your Son,
Especially in faith, since that’s what I long for
But never seem to grasp for very long.
I know you will be faithful.
I know that death is not for me because you are for me.
Nothing will ever separate me from you. Nothing.
Now, make me a light to my family this day. Amen.

I get up before my alarm goes off. I’m familiar enough with my own body to know when it’s pointless to try to go back to sleep. I wander out to the kitchen to make coffee, and then I sit down to keep writing this chapter, the one you hold in your hands.

The truth that God is always in the room isn’t always as mystical as it sounds. Sometimes it’s just a refrain we sing silently, something we set our souls on, refusing to give in to the great lie that plays to our post-Enlightenment doubt of everything supernatural. If the truth is anything, it’s a rock (Isa. 26:4). Rock doesn’t bend to you; you bend to it. My doubts and fears met the granite of God that night. My unbelieving thoughts eventually fell away. I remembered again who I am in God. I am a creature in God’s spoken world, born to speak with him, equipped by God’s own Spirit to assault every lie of the devil with Jesus’s clarion call to believe (John 20:27). God is here.

[1] Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1998), 194.

[2] John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World(Colorado Springs, CO: Waterbook, 2019), 47.

[3] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 164.

[4] Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology: Prolegomena and the Doctrines of Revelation, Scripture, and God, 2n ed., ed. William Edgar (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2007), 340.

Moments That Make Us

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