A refreshing exchange

There are a lot of different kinds of people who read this blog, from old friends to new friends, close family to extended family, acquaintances, strangers, and random visitors, all with different backgrounds and different ways of looking at the world, so I don’t always know how to formulate some of the things that I want to write when it comes to the stuff that is closest to my heart.

But in this case I want to just simply say, whether you know this already or it is a totally foreign concept to you, that GOD’S PRESENCE CHANGES EVERYTHING.

These past two days we have had the opportunity to take time to seek God (that is, to set aside time, with no other distractions, for the purpose of deepening our relationship with our Creator/Friend/Father/Lover/King by spending time with Him).

Sometimes when I spend time with God in worship and Bible study it is to find out something new about Him that I didn’t know before. Other times I do it to voice my prayer requests and to ask Him to do something in me or for me. But this time I felt like all I wanted to do and all I needed to do was to spend time with Him, just to be with Him and to be where He is. To be still in His presence.

And I “found out” something that I have known for 9 years but that I have not experienced for awhile: that God’s presence changes everything. His nearness is so holy and so peaceful and so loving and so consuming and so other and so powerful, that things that are not from Him have to disappear. His presence will not tolerate it, and those things have to go. And so there were many things that disappeared from my emotions and my thoughts that had been weighing me down; they simply had to go. Heavy feelings of hopelessness, resentment, frustration, worthlessness, powerlessness – all of it had to disappear in the light of God’s presence. He replaced it with a hope for the future, thankfulness, anticipation, a sense of what He sees when He looks at me, and faith in His goodness. It was *such* a refreshing exchange.

There is nothing more powerful and more desirable than His presence, His nearness. It really does change everything.

*when I mention "God" I am referring to Jesus from Nazareth, the Jewish man who is the Son of the Creator of the universe.