Where is God?

Today I was pondering some of the ideas, trying to wrap my mind around some of the recent things I've read and heard that have been in the forefront of my thoughts. What is the nature of God's existence? How does He fit into our reality, our daily life, the physical, and the metaphysical? In other words, where is He? Where is God in all this, in the struggle, in the suffering, even in the most joyful moments? Where is he in the Church, the swaying and shifting dance it has carried out throughout the centuries? Where is He?

In the forefront of my mind, swirling in and amalgamating there has been an illustration that was introduced to me by Rabbi Zalman Marcus when Ashley and I went to his lecture on Heaven and Hell.

The rabbi asked us to consider flame, fire. When you light a match fire happens; flame appears. Now, science can explain the dynamics of how fire happens. Heat oxygen and the right fuel added together make fire. What science has no elucidation, no explanation for is where the fire came from. Where did it come from? No one knows. Rabbi Marcus went on to explain that the Mystics believed that “fire is everywhere.” Fire sits in a reality hand in hand with ours. Separate yet mysteriously undetached from our reality. They believed that Hell and heaven sat in the same sort of reality and that with “the right wick” it can enter ours. Heaven… Hell… reality that is everywhere around us that can sometimes even be seen.

Now with this illustration in mind… where is God? Realizing that there is no perfect explanation within our grasp for the existence of God, can this illustration help us? Is it sufficed to say that God sits hand in hand with yet fills our entire reality? In the book of Acts chapter 17 Paul explains that God is everywhere, “in him we live and move and take our being.”

Today I started reading “Blue Like Jazz .” Right in the first page Donald Miller writes:

“I once listened to an Indian on television say that God was in the wind and the
water, and I wondered at how beautiful that was because that meant that you
could swim in Him or have Him brush your face in a breeze.”

So… where is God? Maybe it’s not about finding where He is but finding “the right wick,” the right kind of heat and oxygen and fuel so that we can experience and see Him. Maybe we’ve made ourselves numb. What if God is as simple as He is complicated? I suggest that God is in the wind, God is in the water, God is in silence, in beauty, in poetry, in music, in blog posts, in the sound of rain, in the scent of trees, in fire. GOD IS EVERYWHERE… try looking for Him there.

Comments

Stephanie said…
Great post!!! You never cease to make me stop and think. I have always thought God was everywhere, but the picture you paint is just beautiful!!! Thank you!!