When God Moves

Sometimes the Lord moves in a whisper, a barely detectable draft with not even enough power to lift a few strands of hair. You lift your prayers to heaven and they seem to go unanswered, as you try to keep your eyes on the horizon, fanning your faith like a flame about to burn out. You flip the pages of your Bible, a mixture of obligation and desperation, surely those pages contain the answer, the answer to your burning question, “Where has God gone?” Your prayers continue only because of your innate awareness, programmed inside of you through years of knowing Christ, that an answer will come.

Despite your waning belief, prayer has become more instinctual than anything else, a means to survival, a piece of bread in a famine. Everything you’ve ever learned about the Lord tells you He must be listening, but your faith is struggling beneath a heavy mass of doubt and fear.

Your prayers have dwindled to a few a day, having malformed into more of a frantic plea than a hopeful petition. Pushing your anger and doubt away, despite all logic, you cling to the only life raft you’ve ever known – your faith—nearly forcing yourself to fall on your knees and beg the Lord to come more powerfully, to rescue you and pull you out of this storm.

Just when your delicate faith threatens to shatter if hit once more, the Lord finally moves. In a windstorm of hope and aha moments, His presence becomes not only obvious, but impossible to ignore. As this tornado whirls through your home, signs of the Lord’s goodness settle upon every surface of your life like dust. As the pieces fall together and His answers come in waves, crashing against your life while you drink up the hope you almost lost for good, your house and family seem to almost float upon His beautiful and constant plan, ebbing and flowing according to God’s design.

Having doubted His presence a short time ago, you are now entirely content with handing it to God, allowing Him to work, and hanging on tightly to the promise that His plan has been there all along, hiding just outside your line of sight.

When things settle down, your household still giddy from the infusion of faith God provided, you have a chance to look back on the pain you endured, yet conquered. It does not take long to recognize God’s mighty hand upon each prayer you prayed and each tear you cried.

Resting once again in calm waters, you lift your eyes to the skies and thank Him for your suffering, for it was this suffering that allowed you to see God’s promise fulfilled – He will always show up, and He is always moving.

“I will never leave you, nor forsake you.” ~Hebrews 13:5