God With Us

When you're searching for God, where is the first place you look for Him? When you pray, to where do you turn your eyes? (What about the eyes of your heart?) 

It's easy for us to think of God as somewhere "up there" - some mist in the clouds, some phantom in the heavens, some wisp in the wind. (Remember, though, that the prophet told us that God was not in the wind.) 

Because we don't know what He "looks like," it's hard for us to envision Him, so we simply try to envision something so much bigger than us that we cannot possibly fathom it, and in doing so, we end up disconnected from the very God we seek. 

Our solution to this, historically, has been to connect to the person of Jesus. After all, God sent His Son to walk among us in our flesh so that we could see Him face-to-face and learn what it means to relate to Him. So when we try to connect to a vision of God, we sometimes default to a vision of Jesus - the walking, talking, flesh-and-blood Son of God who is a little easier to wrap our minds around. 

But...God has always been walking and talking. 

He has not been so far away as we fear. 

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. On the earth, He created a garden, and He then created man and placed him in the Garden. He creates a woman for the man, and together, they go off and do the one thing they are not permitted to do, and in the very next scene, Adam and Eve heard God walking through the Garden in the cool of the day. 

God was walking. 

They dove into some nearby bushes to try to hide, suddenly ashamed that they were naked, and then God called to them, "Where are you?" 

God was talking. 

From the very beginning, God was walking and talking. In fact, this is one of the things that the prophets will continue to mention when they try to remind the people how different the Lord is from their idols, which have eyes but do not see and ears but do not hear and mouths but do not speak. 

The Lord, by contrast, talks and walks. (Jeremiah 10:5, for example.) Always has been. Always will be. 

With eyes that see, ears that hear, a mouth that speaks, and a body that moves. 

No need to dream of Him as some phantom in the clouds or wisp in the wind. He's closer than we think. We need only to walk out of our bushes and see.