Our annual focus year for “True Presence” is coming to a close. As we look back on the past year, there has been an attempt to show that God is truly present with us, and also that we, guided and empowered by the Holy Spirt, are the presence of God for so many of our neighbors around us.
The first challenge here, of course, is seeing that God is present for us. It used to be that people considered God’s presence in our lives to be a given. We also thought of certain places as being special places of God’s presence, like the altar of a church. Notably, when we considered that God was present at the altar, we didn’t need to “feel” Him there, we simply knew He was. But for many people those senses of God’s presence have been replaced by a need for a “feeling,” or an intuiting of the immanence of God’s reality with us.
The next challenge is the challenge of being God’s presence ourselves. Even if we know that God is with us, how do we work as the hands and feet of Christ? There is certainly a part of us that recoils from the thought, thinking that we are too sinful, too imperfect to ever put our hands to His Will. And yet, there is a necessity to show that God is here with us, especially in an era when less and less take His supernatural presence for granted.
Yesterday while I was at the hospital with Cricket, I saw a nurse with a cross tattoo on the back of her neck. I thought to myself about the other religious identifiers that were in the hospital that day, the hijab worn by another, the Hindu “aum” symbol hanging around the neck of a doctor. All of these symbols are arguing for the presence of an understanding of a god in those places. I mused to myself of how it would be amazing if Christians were known for working in hospitals (we did kind of invent them after all) because of the mercy and care that our God has shown us. But there are so many other vocations as well that could exude the presence of God, if only we let Him be present in our lives.
God has claimed each of us as His own. We are each points on the map of His presence in our reality before He brings His heaven down to earth and blends the two. May we go out and be His presence here: gentle, caring, strong, wise, and all of the things that He has given us by claiming us in His Spirit.