"Oh no, You never let go, through the calm and through the storm..." - Matt Redman
Maybe the most wonderfully amazing thing about walking out life with the King of the universe is knowing that there is no place we can go during the course of our day where God isn't already.
God's presence with all who believe is everywhere and anywhere and simultaneously with people we don't even know both near and far 24/7...because that's what He promised through King David in Psalm 139, and to those past and present He has empowered to carry Good News in word and deed. Often, like Jacob, we don't realize all of that until after a crisis, mood, or tough day passes, but even that doesn't disqualify us from the most wonderfully amazing thing. It's a promise welded in eternity. We can delete the phrase "fear of abandonment."
Sometimes, being in God's presence is a quiet sense of wonder, like gazing at creation and realizing you don't have to talk yourself out of the possibility that all of this maybe just exploded onto the scene one day eons ago and just so happened to sort itself out in unspeakably beautiful colors, landscapes, and innumerable unique flying, crawling, swimming creatures.
Being in God's presence can also look like the jaw-dropping miracle of a new son or daughter born into a family, and it can also look like the mysterious but unmistakable "something" awareness of God being more real to us than usual when a roomful of sons and daughters born into a Kingdom unite in song or praise...
....or even united awe-struck silence.
God's presence can be a lot of things that are difficult to package in one tidy box, but mostly, it is the most wonderfully amazing sense (often unexplainable) of a promise fulfilled unlike any other:
And not only that, a wonderfully amazing sense—even in the midst of storms —of assurance, protection, of friendship supreme, strength for the journey, a peace that passes every bit of understanding, of anticipation of hearing something life-changing for ourselves or someone on our path, of miraculous interventions and supernatural fuel to bring the Kingdom to others...of fullness of joy.
And it all may be very quiet and holy at times, or very loud and holy, or somewhere in between.
God's "You never let go" presence is the glue that holds us together: of both feeling and knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that you and the God who made and delights in you are always and forever connected...the way He planned it all along—hands-on, gripped-with Love, lifted up out of the pits of life and encouraged always and forever by His incomparable mighty strength...perhaps sometimes feeling distant, but never, ever further than His breath.
Words can fall short when trying to wrap your brain around something like describing God's most wonderfully amazing presence, but because the promise is for a lifetime, these come pretty close:
"It is you, not I, who have been carried from before you were born.
Indeed, when you were still in the womb, I was taking care of you.
And when you are old, I will still be there, carrying you.
When your limbs grow tired, your eyes are weak,
And your hair a silvery gray, I will carry you as I always have.
I will carry you and save you."
(Isaiah 46:3-4, Voice)
[Updated from a previous blog]
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