Holy Awareness

Awareness is one the most important things we seek in our spiritual journey.  It is not just the occasional sense of holy awareness that we seek, but the one which is always with us.  It is more than not just being alone.  Being alone is not necessarily a bad thing.  It is instead a thing sought after from time to time.  So often our awareness of holy presence is seen as a response to some effort of ours.  Maybe it is the response of worship, or daily prayers, or doing some act of kindness for another.    

The truth is we have no control over the way God manifests His presence in our lives.  An even greater truth is the reality that there is no moment which can be divorced from the possibility of holy awareness.  After all, the One whose presence we seek to know and experience is the One who has chosen to abide in us.  In the Jesus teaching the Apostle John remembered and recorded in his gospel, we are told numerous times that Jesus has chosen to abide in us.  He is as close to us as a branch is to the vine, as close as the vine is to the root, and so near that He literally becomes a part of the essence of who we are  (John 15).    

How we can live with that kind of nearness and not constantly breathe prayers of gratitude for holy awareness should be seen as a great mystery!  Those who love one another carry with them an awareness of the one they love in their hearts even though circumstances may creat physical separation.  There is a sense in which those who truly love are never out of the other's awareness.  When Paul posed the question, "Who will separate us from the love of Christ?"  (Romans 8:35), he knew the answer.  Nothing.  No one.  We live in Christ not by sight, but by faith, and thus, we can live confident of holy awareness in every moment of breath given to us.