Where is God?

Posted by Harmony Dust on Friday, March 30, 2012 · 4 Comments 

Where is God?

During the past three years, I have experienced some high highs, and low lows.  Life can be like that. From losing my marriage and my home and navigating single parenting, to experiencing God do a deep healing work in me and watching Him move in Treasures in a way that can only be Him.

This season has required a heightened level of adrenaline and a certain desperation for God.

The other day, I started wrestling with this idea that something is missing. Something felt wrong.  I have been spending time in prayer and reading the word, but it doesn’t quite feel the same.  Am I disconnecting from God? I wondered.  God, where are you?

I have recently entered a new season.  There has been finalization and resolution in many of the circumstances in my personal life.  The dust has settled. There are no major personal hardships forcing me into a state of desperation.  Some days I find myself waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the next major crisis to surface.

Yes, something is missing. Crisis. Chaos. Intensity.  This might even be one of the first times in my life I am faced with so little chaos.  My childhood was filled with it.  And even in the seasons when I didn’t have my own major battles to deal with, pre-recovery for co-dependency, I was sure to fill the void with someone else’s crisis.

I know well enough not to find someone else’s troubles to immerse myself in.  The new challenge is to not find just enough work to do to overwhelm me.

The other day I watched a movie called “Brothers”. It was about a man who went to war, leaving his wife, children and brother behind.  He was captured by the enemy, isolated, tortured, and forced to kill a fellow soldier.

When he was finally rescued and sent home, he suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He was hyper-vigilant and paranoid, convinced his wife and brother were betraying him.  He cocked his gun at the slightest sound outside of their quiet suburban home.

In the midst of this, he pleaded to be re-deployed.  He wanted to get back on the battlefield.  Back to the familiarity of war.

This man was so used to living in a state of battle, that he didn’t know how to live in peace anymore.  I realized the same is true for me.

I have grown so familiar with being in the battle that it feels unnatural to be off of the field. I have mistaken the quiet and mundane for God’s absence. For disconnection.

I am learning to experience God in the ordinary again. In the quiet moments.  The days when He is not giving me some huge revelation about my heart.  In the moments when I am not being stretched and pruned. But in the moments when I am sitting under the shade of the tree. Resting in the perfect paradox of His love, which is both simple and profound.

Ecclesiastes says there is a time for everything.  A season for every activity under the heavens.  I want to enjoy the presence of God in all of them.

He is Emmanuel.  God with us.

He is in the storm.  He is in the pain.  And He is in the mundane.