Seven years ago, author Philip Yancey began venturing into the
spiritual desert for the first time in his Christian walk. His
relationship with God seemed dry. He wondered where the freshness of
God went. He questioned if God was hearing his prayers. "What is
happening to me?" he thought.
"During that time, I felt very dry,"
Yancey recalls in an interview with In
Touch. "I didn't have the sense that my prayers were going
anywhere, no sense that they mattered or that God cared. I had no
sense of the presence of God in my life.
"Then I went out and bought the 'Book
of the Hours.' They have prayers, meditations, and Scripture
arrangements for each day. I would read them and say, 'God, I don't
have any prayers or know what to pray, but I want to make this my
prayer today.' I did that for a whole year until I began to come out
of that trying time."
Yancey was stunned that a seasoned
Christian would have to endure such a
difficult period in his relationship with God.
"Nobody had warned me that I would go
through that," Yancey says.
From
this trying time, Yancey draws the analogy of difficulty in our
relationship with God like golfing prodigy Tiger Woods' struggle on
the course in 1999.
"Tiger Woods completely revamped his
golf swing," Yancey says. "It was very frustrating because everything
had worked so well before for him. And at
first, it didn't work as well as he would've liked. But he was
convinced that when his new golf swing came around, it would be better
than ever. And now we all know what he did in the year 2000, winning
three of golf's four most prestigious tournaments.
"We have to keep pressing through the
difficult times because we know eventually it's going to get better."
The invisible God
One attribute of God is glaringly
evident to us as we develop a relationship with Him: We can't see Him
with our natural eyes. Unable to tangibly interact with God frustrates
many believers and discourages many people from entering into faith in
Jesus Christ-and it makes us weary in the deserts of our Christian
walk.
With that understanding and his own
experiences, Yancey has written a thought-provoking book that attempts
to answer many of these questions, entitled "Reaching
for the Invisible God."
"A lot of Christians have distorted
ideas that if something bad happens then God is behind it," Yancey
explains. "I think Christians are confused. We tend to blame God when
things go wrong and ignore Him when things go right.
What I want to do is reverse that,
praising Him when things are going well and refusing to blame Him when
things are going bad.
"We may not be able to physically see
God, but if [we] want to know what He looks like, look at Jesus. We
don't see Jesus going around and causing pain - what He did was heal
them. God doesn't want to see people suffering in their pain."
When Yancey first accepted Christ and
entered into a relationship with God for the first time in his life,
he began to see the "invisible God" all around him.
The three things that opened Yancey's
eyes to "see" God were nature, classical music and romantic love. His
misconceptions that God squashed people for fun was squashed by his
realization that God is indeed a God of goodness.
"Seeing God in those things softened me
up to realize that God is a God of grace and love, not anger," Yancey
says. "He is love, and everything that gives off a sense of beauty is
derived from God. God loves people.
"As I began to realize this, I found
some friends who let me be honest with all my questions about God.
They were gentle and let me grow. Sometimes I had some immature
reactions, but that time and those experiences helped me discover God
in my life."
In
his book, Yancey recounts an episode that took place while driving
home near midnight from a New Year's Eve party in Colorado Springs,
Colorado. Along the dark, winding roads he drove through the
mountains, unable to see what was all around him. But the moment the
clock struck 12 and the new year began, hikers began launching
colorful fireworks from the side of the mountain, as their lights
revealed the valley and the ominous Pike's Peak in the background.
"It had been there all along, the
mountain, but we had no eyes to see it," Yancey writes.
Eye-openers
In drawing parallels to our spiritual
journeys through mountains and valleys, Yancey says we oftentimes are
unable to see God looming over us. But he offers up some suggestions
to help us "see" the invisible God.
