Every moment an encounter with God

WE need to be most aware that every moment and situation can and

should be an encounter with God. And this is no gratuitous assertion,

considering that God is omnipresent.

Psalm 139 expresses this truth very beautifully. “Where can I go from

your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the

heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the

sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me

fast.” (7-10)

Besides, he is full of love and solicitude over us. He is always

attentive to us. We just have to learn how to correspond to this basic

reality about God and us. God actually begs us to give ourselves to

him. “My son, give me your heart, and let your heart delight in my

ways,” says the Book of Proverbs. (23,26)

Perhaps, many times we have to make a conscious effort to put

ourselves in his presence, because given our human condition, we tend

to take him for granted, not really out of malice but simply out of

our human limitations. It takes God’s grace and time and effort before

we can be real contemplatives, when seeing God in everything becomes

automatic and instinctive.

Fact is we are so easily dominated by our physical, temperamental and

environmental conditionings that we ignore the spiritual and

supernatural reality of God. Not that God is not in our physical,

temperamental and environmental world. He is all there. But he needs

to be spiritually discerned before we can meet him. We need to

exercise our faith, activate our piety before we can meet him.

Thus, Christ said once: “Ask, and it shall be given you. Seek, and you

shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For everyone that

asks receives. And he that seeks finds. And to him that knocks, it

shall be opened.” (Mt 7,7-8)

We have to be wary of our tendency to think that there are moments in

our life—in fact, the bigger part of our life—when we would just be on

our own or that God is not present or is irrelevant. We have to

correct that mentality.

We especially have to be most careful when we find ourselves in

situations of stress, tiredness, laziness, or when we are faced with

problems and difficult challenges, because these are the moments when

we are most vulnerable to think that God is not around, thus opening

ourselves to the tricks of our wounded flesh, the world and the devil.

We need to realize more deeply that we need God more than anything

else in life. We definitely need him more than we need air, food and

water. We need him more than our powerful arts, sciences and

technologies.

And we need him most especially in our moments of weakness and

temptation. Without him, we surely will end up sooner or later tempted

and finally falling into sin. We may be enjoying for a while the

benefits of our human powers, but without God, we certainly cannot go

the distance. We end up sinning.

When we are with God, when we manage to make every moment as an

encounter with God, we somehow would get to know what is essential in

our life. We can find redemptive meaning in any situation we can find

ourselves in. Even in the worst scenario of our life, we can always

find reason to hope.

Besides, we would notice that we can generate a spiritual energy that

goes beyond what our food and all the other natural sources can give

us. We would not confine ourselves to the natural world, but can

manage to live in the spiritual and supernatural world.