At lunchtime I often slip out of my office at work and drive a short distance to a secluded spot that has a fair amount of landscaping and trees. Business parks are often wonderfully landscaped, with ornamental trees and flowers and shrubs and such. They can be good places to pray for busy corporate people like myself.
Well, on a certain day this fall I slipped out of the office and drove a short distance to a beautiful secluded spot and opened my Bible to Eph 1 and began to read. Paul, apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God and as I read the word will I was taken up into God in an amazing way. It was like getting a glimpse of God “through the tear in the lampshade”. The metaphor is obvious. In the same way a lampshade exists and diffuses the light of the lamp, this world often diffuses the Light of God, but from time to time we get to peak through a tear in the lampshade and see more directly the source of the Light. I was caught up in a more fully realized expression of the extent of God’s will in the world.
I had an overwhelming sense of the will of God being done in all things. It was the fall and leaves were falling off the trees. I could see them swirling to the ground and had the sense that each invisible breeze, each turn and swirl of each separate leaf was taking place in the will of God. I saw the clouds blowing in the wind and had the sense that each formation was according to Gods handiwork. It had been raining, and I even had the strong sense that each drop of water was being absorbed into the earth in the will of God. People were driving in cars, and birds were singing and I was astounded to think that they were moving in the will of God and that every detail of every part of creation was happening exactly according to and in the will of God. All particles, both small and great, existed and were in the service of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
This went on for 20 minutes or so, and then wham, the tear in the lampshade closed and lunch hour was over and it was time to go back to work. Praying about it later, I sensed that my experience had been a sort of playful act on the part of God. I sensed that He was giving me the smallest glimpse of the realized fact of the will of God, which is taking place everywhere with everything all the time. It is all I can handle.
The fact of humanity is that we have been cast out of the Garden of the awareness of God, and suffer from the fact that we cannot often see beyond our own material existence. One of the implications of a passage in Romans….“God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and Truth” is the fact that to regularly encounter God in a worshipful way, we must learn to move past the materialism of our world, and peer through the tear in the lampshade directly at God. The disciplines of negation…..silence, solitude, and fasting are some necessary disciplines to sustain a more consistent view of God through the tear in the lampshade. We live in a world that is material. God affirmed the material world calling it “good” and came into the material world in a very unique way in the Incarnation of His Son in the babe at Bethlehem. He lived a perfect life, and offered Himself by the “will” of God on the torture stake to open the way for all of humanity to come to God, “by making peace, through his blood shed on the cross.”
So the world we live in is both material and spiritual and we must learn the implications of these things if we are to navigate life as God has intended. One can sit in a business park and have a direct encounter with Him who is both transcendent and immanent, meaning the One who has perfect knowledge and existence in this material world and the world of Spirit, the one who exists in our moment by moment existence, and the one who lives beyond time.
Eric Miller
