Where is God?

Do you ever feel as if God is very distant, that no matter how hard you look, you cannot find him? Job did. Job wanted to confront the Lord with charges of injustice, but he complained, “Behold, I go forward, but he is not there, and backward, but I do not perceive him; on the left hand when he is working, I do not behold him; he turns to the right hand, but I do not see him.” Job was frustrated by his horrible circumstance. Yet even in his frustration, the very next words out of Job’s mouth were these: “But he knows the way that I take; when he has tried me, I shall come out as gold.” Job knew through faith that even when he couldn’t seem to find God, God was always watching him. 

Centuries later, Paul would proclaim a similar message to an audience in Athens. “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man…And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth…that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being.’”

No matter how distant God seems, he is near. Whether you are on the top of a mountain or in the belly of a fish, God is always with you, ready to hear your prayer, ready to lend you the comfort of his presence.

- Glenn Hawley