Beholding: Deepening Our Experience in GodExemplo

Tender Mystery

How do we commune with God without agenda or necessity? Many of us pray like crazy in suffering, then forget about God in healing, because we don’t know what to do when the basis of our relationship is no longer need.

Years ago, I experienced intense, prolonged illness. During that time, my life with God became about watching Him, watching life, and accepting who He is even when He offended me by not healing, not changing, not providing, and not answering.

My need to know and understand what God was doing in my life in order to trust and admire Him was dethroned. I began to trust His goodness aside from the chaos of my life. Aside from the good things too.

On days when depression and despair consumed me, I was able to lie there and say to myself, “Be still and know that God is still God today, still beautiful, still wonderful, still loving,” and sit in my darkness knowing that my feelings couldn’t change reality (see Psalm 46:10).

I gradually realized I was able to see God in other people more clearly. Like we were all just little children, some more lost than others. Beholding God came to mean beholding the other.

In the years since, I have had less and less to say in prayer. I sit more with God, letting Him be Mystery, Wonder, Grace, Goodness, and Truth, despite whether I understand it or not, whether my emotions change or not. This isn’t an ecstatic experience, but an ordinary, humanizing one.

Learning to experience the world with this kind of tender mystery irrevocably transformed my life. It removed the power of sickness, division, despair, and hopelessness. My world wasn’t free of those things, but they became peripheral issues.

It was like I was falling in love with God again. Not with a naive first love, but an older, deeper, and more truthful love. Like we were both seeing each other for who we were for the first time, not who we wished the other was. Except, it was me, not God, who was finally waking up. Prayer became existence. Existence became beautiful. I realized I’d been praying in reverse my whole life, looking for a working relationship when God longed for a friend.

How do you feel about the idea of “sitting with God”? In what ways do your emotions dictate your beliefs about God?