meeting god on the road
“These days, I meet God on the road with my running shoes on.”
I wrote those words in September of 2020 during the chaos of COVID. In the midst of one of the most confusing and overwhelming seasons I’ve faced, I decided to cope by training for a marathon. The training regime I followed was highly structured and required me to work out 6 days a week for 17 weeks. Those weeks of training were some of the hardest, but also most grounding, weeks of my entire year. So much was up in the air during those months but my works outs were completely laid out for me. All I had to do was follow the plan, which actually allowed me to rest a bit and not have to work so hard for direction in this one huge area. God used the mental silence that following this plan created to meet me. Somehow the clarity of a defined training plan combined with the hard work of actually following it created space for me to breath more easily and to listen for God along the way.
When I reread those words now, I am struck by both the beautiful truth of them and the fact that I don’t meet God in that same place these days. While I did train for that marathon and run it, I haven’t run much since then. (Side note: I am incredibly proud of myself for accomplishing this goal and I could say a lot more about the experience, but that’s another thought for another time). Turns out devoting much of my life to running for roughly 4 months has resulted in me mostly not running for the next 3ish years. BUT while I may be taking a potentially permanent break from running, my relationship with God is not on hiatus. I still meet with him regularly, just in different places.
I think that’s been true for most of my life. There will be a stretch of time when I connect with him in nature or through specific music; sometimes I engage with him at church, or with a devotional; and sometimes the place I see him the most is in a specific friendship. All of those have been wonderful circumstances to find God, but as my attention shifts over time so does the place where I find him the most. Yet the dogmatic part of me raised in conservative southern churches can be a bit judgmental about this line of thought. After all, you’re “supposed” to read your Bible EVERY DAY and pray the RIGHT way and on and on the voice can go. But this feels restrictive and somehow misses the relationship part of the equation.
During his conversation with Nicodemus in John 3:8 Jesus says, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” He is talking about the presence of the holy spirit here. When I sit with this verse, it reminds me how the wind is almost always present if I slow down enough to notice. I think Jesus is also like that: sometimes I feel him strongly, but other times I have to slow down to notice. The key here seems to be looking and listening for the wind that already exists – is it a friendship, a specific place in my house or out in nature, or that book of blessings that I read this morning? If I believe that God is always here somewhere it opens up the possibility for me to look for where he is currently. Even if it is different now than it was a couple months or years ago. He is ever-present, but my shifting through seasons allows space for our relationship to be dynamic.
When I hold all these ideas together, I am left with a few questions to carry with me (and maybe you will too): On this day, in this season of life, where am I meeting God? How do I hear him these days? What is he saying to me? Can I slow down enough to listen and feel for the wind of his presence around me?
Maybe sometime in the future I’ll meet him running again. But whether or not I choose to put my shoes on, I know he will be with me somewhere. I just have to be willing to look and listen.
Noelle joined the Barnabas Center in May of 2018. She has a Bachelors of Arts in Psychology from Berry College in Rome, GA and a Master of Science in Counseling from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Previously she has worked with college age individuals and adults dealing with anxiety, depression, self-harm, identity issues, relationship concerns, and challenges related to life transitions. She is passionate about walking with individuals as they face the struggles of life and the questions that come from living in a broken world.
