God Be With You

Spirituality Column #53
November 13, 2007
Current in Carmel (IN) Newspaper

God Be With You
By Bob Walters

How close are you to God?

Pretty close? Not so close? Don’t believe?

Truth is, we all have a different answer to that question. Just like each of us has our own picture of heaven, hell, or the nature of God’s existence, so too we each have in our own hearts a unique sense of our closeness to and relationship with God. There’s not really a “right” answer, and it usually changes over time anyway, but I pose it as one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves.

How close am I to God?

My reality in God, Christ and the Holy Spirit is something that I can talk about, and it might even make sense to others of similar religious orientation, but it’s not something I can share completely with anyone except God. The only real way to share our closeness to and love of God with others, after all, is to love others.

Your reality with God, your closeness to God, is your own business. Not worse or better than mine … just, your own. It’s unique, special and important.

Oh so important.

When we question each other’s closeness to God it hits at the core, I think, of what annoys non-believers and edge-believers about deep believers. If I claim a firm reality in Christ, oddly enough, people who don’t actually believe in Christ will perceive it as a smack down; a claim of superiority, even though it is actually, biblically, a claim of humility.

Now turn that question around and ask “How close is God to you?” and the Christian answer is unswerving and the same for every living soul: God is not only with you and close to you, He is in you.

Christ is in you because the fully-God Christ became fully human to create communion between God and Man, and put the Holy Spirit of God in each of us. That’s sort of the Bible, especially the New Testament, in a nutshell.

My point is that I can’t tell or compel anyone to be closer to God, but I can absolutely with all confidence tell anyone that God is this close to them.

He is with us, and in us. That includes you, and that’s a fact.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) begins his second year writing this column and both congratulates the editors of Current in Carmel for their success and thanks them for this column space.