There and Here

One of the most surprising things about coming to the farm some fifteen years ago is the growing awareness of holy presence.  He comes in the unexpected.  This afternoon as the sun was being chased down to the edge of the distant horizon, a sudden wind picked up and blew against me as I worked with the tractor in the pasture.  It was a sudden moment of going from what declared itself to be a mundane task into one filled with the awareness of the Spirit. While some may speak of the moment as an expression of a vivid imagination, I have learned to be open and attentive to such times in ways that I never knew when life centered around the pulpit and the altar.    

This afternoon's revelation of presence has come too many times for me to delegate it to imagination.  As I rode along the edge of the fence line in the pasture this afternoon, I was reminded of the time I tried to slip up on God as He made Himself known  through the presence of an owl perched on a limb hanging over the fence.  There is a longer story that goes with that afternoon of revelation, but is was for me one of those earlier moments of coming to understand that the God whom I had experienced for a lifetime through the church was still present and revealing Himself through the creation instead of the brick and mortar of a building.  

What has grown strongly within me in these years of being immersed in the creation is that God is not experienced and His voice is not heard over there, or out yonder, but here in the present moment.  What I have also come to understand is that this has always been true regardless of where I have found myself.  It matters not whether we are standing on the beach watching a sunset, or at the end of an alley seeing the squalor of a homeless community.  God is present everywhere.  The Psalmist pointed us to this reality  long ago as he asked, "Where can I go from Your Spirit?  Or where can I flee from Your presence.?"  (Psalm 139:2)