What Does God’s Presence Feel Like?

Since many of you don’t read the comments on these blogs, I wanted to highlight a question someone asked on the last one about my friend’s funeral:

What does God’s presence feel like? What do you mean when you say ‘God’s presence came powerfully into the room’? It’s one of those phrases that when people mention it, leaves me empty, because I don’t understand. It makes me wonder if I’m really getting all this God stuff or am doing something wrong. I mean it seems it’s a key thing yet I don’t get it. I think I have the spiritual capacity of a marshmallow!!

I get that question a lot, so I think others might be interested in my answer to her:

God’s presence “feels like” different things to different people, and even different ways in different circumstances. I don’t want to describe it as a feeling, because it goes way beyond that. At its heart it is a simple knowing that something greater than us is making his presence known in the room. That can be accompanied by supernatural events, a simple inner knowing, or the affirmation of what a number of people are sensing at the same moment.

For us at that hospital bed it was a powerful sense of connection with him and each other. It added a lightness to the room that was more spiritually seen than physically seen. It manifested itself in the lightness of heart and trust that we all sensed afterward, very different from when we went in. But it doesn’t always look like that, which is why I hesitate to define it. I find people recognize him less when they are burdened down by expectations of what it should look like. Then we are looking for manifestations, rather than simply seeking him.

For many people it isn’t so much that God isn’t making himself known, it’s that they haven’t yet tuned to his frequency to recognize his voice or his fingerprints in the simple realities around them. I think most of God’s supernatural working appears to be incredibly natural as it unfolds. Looking back we see with greater clarity what he was doing…

- Wayne Jacobsen