In light of some of the events in my life during recent months, I am often asked how my relationship… or time with God is going.  My answer, which is often unsatisfactory for the questioneer, remains simple.  My relationship with God is a daily knowing and being known by God, and I know that I belong there.

It’s nebulous for many who don’t understand the language of relationship in a way that I’ve nurtured it for some time.

The psalmist writes, “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence.”  The knowledge that God is near settled deep into who I am at a very young age… long before I was able to find a verse from the Bible to back it up.  My experience of relationship with God was being shaped long before I could tell you where the verses were to back it up.  I’m good with that.

I’ve always been one to gaze deeply on God in the world around me.  There is a Belgic Confession that reads like this:  creation can be read as a most elegant book, wherein, all creatures, great and small, are as so many characters leading us to see clearly the invisible things of God.

With my heart, eyes and mind open, I spend my time in a long gaze at God, myself, others and the world around me with the hope that I will see it all the way that God sees it all.

There is an attentiveness that becomes more natural to me as I give intention to my experience with everything that has been given.  It’s not all rosey in nature, for there is no doubt that pain and separation play a large roll in the day-to-day of life.  I often times find that there are more questions that surface than there are answers.  But who am I to even pretend that I could fully understand how the meaning of it all will look in the end.

This is all to nebulous for those who begin with theological answers that they attempt to fit all of life into.  To ask the question, how does your relationship with God look today? sounds to me like: how are you fitting God into your life?  Truth is, I don’t give much attention to fitting God into anything.  I don’t desire that much control over a life that finds awe and wonder in the whole of creation, simply by gazing at the interplay of creation, history, and the other human beings that cross my path.

I just stop… and pay attention.