God promises, "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you" (Hebrews 13:5). Yet sometimes God feels close enough to touch, and at other times he seems silent.
These seven stories about God's presence, retold in our own words, explore both experiences: moments of overwhelming nearness and long seasons when God seems hidden. Each ends with a takeaway for sermons or reflection.
Stories in this collection:
- Pascal's Night of Fire
- How God Is Like a Dolphin
- Angels Around the Mission House
- Soldier Crabs and the Incarnation
- "Spasms of Grace"
- "Your God Is Too Big": A Pastor's Grief
- The Voyage of Life: The Guardian We Cannot Always See
Pascal's Night of Fire
When Blaise Pascal, the brilliant seventeenth-century French mathematician, scientist and philosopher, died in 1662, a servant noticed something stitched into the lining of his coat. It was a small piece of parchment, folded around a paper copy of the same text.
Across the top Pascal had drawn a cross. Beneath it he had written a date and a time: Monday 23 November 1654, from about half past ten in the evening until about half past midnight. Then came a single word, written large: Fire.
What followed was Pascal's own record of an intense two-hour encounter with God, which has come to be known as his Memorial. It is not a polished essay. It reads like a series of cries from someone overwhelmed.
He wrote of the "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob", not the God of the philosophers and scholars. He wrote of certainty, of deep feeling, of joy and peace. He wrote of the God of Jesus Christ, and of forgetting the world and everything in it except God. He spoke of the greatness of the human soul, and of the God who can only be found and kept by the ways taught in the gospel.
Then come the famous words: "Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy."
The Memorial also contains confession. Pascal admits that he had separated himself from Christ, fled from him and denied him, and he prays that he may never be separated from him again. He writes of total and sweet surrender to Jesus Christ, and ends with a promise not to forget God's word.
Pascal told no one about that night. But it changed the course of his life, turning him from his scientific work towards a deeper devotion to Christ and to the writing that would later be published as the Pensées.
For the remaining eight years of his life, every time he changed his coat, he carefully unpicked the note and sewed it into the lining of the new one, so that his record of that encounter was always close to his heart.
Most of us will never have an experience quite like Pascal's night of fire. But many of us have had moments when God seemed especially near. Like Pascal, we can treasure those moments, and return to them as gifts that strengthen our faith in the seasons when God feels far away.
Takeaway: Moments when God feels near are gifts to treasure. Remembering them can carry us through the seasons when he feels far away.
Source: Pascal's Memorial (1654); Charles Hummel, The Galileo Connection (IVP, 1986); R. C. Sproul, Doubt and Assurance (Baker, 1993).
How God Is Like a Dolphin
Dolphins are among the best-loved animals in the world. We think of them as friendly, intelligent and beautiful creatures of the sea.
One of the lesser-known facts about dolphins is why they have dark grey backs and pale bellies. The answer is simple: camouflage. Seen from below, a dolphin's pale underside blends in with the bright surface of the water, making it harder for a predator beneath to spot. Seen from above, its dark back merges with the deep water. A dolphin only needs to dive a few metres to disappear from view.
The writer Scott Higgins describes watching a dolphin show at an oceanarium. The crowd gathered, eager to see these spectacular animals. Everyone gasped with delight when the dolphins appeared. Then they dived deep, and the crowd lost sight of them.
And that, he says, was what made it so thrilling. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a pair of dolphins would burst through the surface, leap high into the air and crash back into the water. Then they would vanish again, and the crowd would wait in delighted suspense for the next appearance, not knowing where or when it would be, until three dolphins came dancing across the surface on their tails.
Higgins wonders whether God is a lot like those dolphins.
There are times when God is spectacularly present in our lives, leaping into view. Perhaps it is a walk in the forest, when we are suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of his nearness. Perhaps it is hearing, and truly believing for the first time, that God loves us. Perhaps it is a dramatic answer to prayer, or a clear sense of guidance in a difficult decision.
And there are times when God is like the dolphins after they dive, when all we can see are the deep waters of our lives. We fear what may be lurking down there, and sometimes it does hurt us. We hope with all our hearts that God is down there too, hidden in the depths and invisible to our eyes.
We long for him to come bursting through again, though we are never sure exactly where, when or how. Some of us wait a very long time between appearances. But we wait, trusting that he is there, and we treasure the moments when he breaks through.
Faith, in the end, is learning to trust that the God who leapt into view in those bright moments is still present in the deep places, even when we cannot see him.
Takeaway: God is no less present when he is hidden. Faith means waiting and watching for the next time he breaks the surface.
Source: Illustration by Scott Higgins.
Angels Around the Mission House
A story retold by Billy Graham; it cannot be independently verified.
John G. Paton was a Scottish missionary who served in the New Hebrides, now Vanuatu, in the South Pacific in the nineteenth century. His work there was often dangerous, and he faced great hostility.
In his book on angels, Billy Graham recounts a remarkable story from Paton's life. One night, warriors from a local tribe surrounded the mission house, intending to burn it down and kill the Patons.
Terrified, John Paton and his wife spent the whole night in prayer, asking God to protect them. When daylight came, they were astonished to see the warriors simply turn and leave without attacking.
A year later the chief of that tribe became a Christian. As he and Paton talked, the missionary asked him about that night. What had stopped the warriors from burning the house and killing them?
The chief answered with a question of his own. Who were all those men who were there with you?
There was no one there except my wife and me, Paton replied.
But the chief insisted that he and his warriors had seen hundreds of tall men standing guard all around the mission house, dressed in shining garments and holding drawn swords. They had not dared to attack.
Takeaway: "The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and he delivers them" (Psalm 34:7). We are never as alone as we feel.
Source: Billy Graham, Angels: God's Secret Agents.
Soldier Crabs and the Incarnation
If you ever find yourself on a sandbank or tidal flat in eastern Australia after the tide has gone out, you may see soldier crabs.
They look quite different from ordinary crabs. Instead of a flat, oval shell, a soldier crab has a rounded, sky-blue body about the size of a small coin, held up off the sand on long, spindly, pale legs.
What gives soldier crabs their name is their habit of marching about in groups of tens, hundreds or even thousands. When they come out of their burrows to feed, their close formation and blue shells make them look like an army on the move.
But if you see them and start walking over for a closer look, you will discover something else about them. They have an amazing ability to burrow into the sand. Within moments they disappear, corkscrewing down and leaving nothing behind but little mounds of sand.
Every time you get close, that is what they do. To them you are enormous and overwhelming. You could be a predator. In fact, the only way you could ever get really close to a soldier crab would be to become one yourself.
That is a striking picture of how God has come to us. If he approached us in all his splendour and glory, we would be overwhelmed and afraid. So he chose to come in a way we could bear. He became a human being. Not a powerful, overwhelming figure, but an ordinary person, born as a baby, who lived among us, so that we could draw near to him without fear.
As John wrote, "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us" (John 1:14).
Takeaway: If God had come to us in his full glory, we would have hidden. So in Jesus he became one of us, an ordinary human being, so that we could draw near (John 1:14).
Source: Illustration by Scott Higgins.
"Spasms of Grace"
In 1999 the acclaimed Scottish novelist A. L. Kennedy published a short book called On Bullfighting.
Bullfighting is something many people outside Spain find hard to understand, and many find it deeply troubling. But for those who grow up with it, it can have an almost religious quality. Kennedy explored its long history, and its roots in ancient spectacles in which animals were fought in Roman arenas.
Her first bullfight, she wrote, was a dreadful affair, with inexperienced matadors doing little more than butchering the animals. But when she watched the leading matadors of the day, she saw something else: an intuitive understanding of the bull, and a strange kind of engagement between human and animal.
In an interview, Kennedy was asked what someone with no preparation might make of a bullfight. People arrive with one of two clichés, she said. Some expect a bloodthirsty crowd taking part in a kind of savage ritual. Others expect something beautifully choreographed, like a dance.
Neither is right, she said. Even with a very good matador and a very good bull, it is never seamless and never entirely graceful. It is an odd, ramshackle thing, full of strange pauses, clumsy moments and patches of costume drama. But in the middle of all that, there are what she called "spasms of grace": brief moments of strange and sometimes beautiful communication.
Whatever we think of bullfighting itself, her phrase is a striking description of life in the wider world. So much of our world is violent, painful, cruel or simply clumsy and ramshackle. Yet somehow, in the middle of it all, we keep glimpsing spasms of grace: moments of sheer goodness, beauty and generosity that point beyond themselves to the God who is present even here.
Takeaway: Life is often ramshackle too, full of pain and clumsy moments. Yet even here God gives us spasms of grace: moments of goodness and beauty that remind us he is present.
Source: A. L. Kennedy, interview in Atlantic Unbound (2001).
"Your God Is Too Big": A Pastor's Grief
In 1986 the Presbyterian minister Daniel Hans and his wife, Beth, lost their three-year-old daughter, Laura, to cancer.
In the last nine months of her life, they watched in agony as their little girl went through repeated hospital stays and several operations. Their hearts broke as they watched her die, and they struggled to make sense of what had happened.
Afterwards Hans published a collection of sermons he had preached during his daughter's illness and in the time after her death, under the title God on the Witness Stand. One of the sermons is called "Caution: Your God Is Too Big".
In it, Hans described how he had once asked his congregation about their disappointments with God, the things they had hoped God would do but he had not.
People shared painful stories. They had prayed for the life of a newborn baby, only to see the child die. They had hoped God would protect his people from violence, only to hear of an elderly woman attacked on her way to church. They had prayed for rain to end a famine, only to see starvation continue. To these, Hans added his own disappointment: he had prayed that God would heal his little girl, but she had grown worse and died.
Disappointments like these, he suggested, are part of life. And if we read the Scriptures honestly, we find that alongside the stories of miracles and mighty acts of God, there are many stories of disappointment, of times when God seemed silent and inactive.
Sometimes, Hans said, we remember only the miracle stories, and so we develop too big a view of God. He did not mean that we can think too highly of God's greatness and power, or of his love and grace. He meant that we can build too big a picture of what God has promised to do. We may claim that God will do things he has not said he will do, at least not regularly and in every situation, and that can hurt both believers and unbelievers when those expectations are disappointed.
God's way in our world, Hans concluded, is not usually to perform the miraculous. More often, it is to walk with us through our suffering.
Takeaway: God does not always remove the storm, but he promises to be with us in it (Isaiah 43:2).
Source: Daniel Hans, God on the Witness Stand (Baker, 1987).
The Voyage of Life: The Guardian We Cannot Always See
In 1840 the American painter Thomas Cole completed a series of four paintings called The Voyage of Life. A second version, painted in 1842, hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Each painting shows a stage of life: childhood, youth, manhood and old age.
The first painting, Childhood, shows a dark cave at the foot of a mountain, with a river flowing out of it. A beautifully carved boat glides out of the cave into a world of lush plants and flowers, on calm and gentle water. In the boat is a laughing baby, and behind the child stands a guardian angel, guiding the boat. Childhood is pictured as a time of wonder and joy.
In the second painting, Youth, the boat has travelled further downstream. The baby has grown into a young man. He now holds the tiller himself, confidently steering towards a majestic, shining castle in the clouds. The riverbanks are still green and beautiful, and the angel stands on the shore, watching him set his own course. Youth is a time of dreams and of the confidence that nothing can hold us back.
In the third painting, Manhood, the scene changes dramatically. The young man has become a man. The river has become a raging torrent, and the sky is dark and threatening. The castle of dreams has disappeared, and the boat's tiller is broken. Ahead lie jagged rocks with white water crashing around them.
The man is caught up in forces he cannot control. He cannot steer. All he can do is clasp his hands and pray. The guardian angel is still there, watching over him from high in the clouds, but the man cannot see it. Cole pictures adulthood as a time when the joy and wonder of childhood, and the confidence of youth, are swept away by the hard realities of life.
The final painting is Old Age. The battered, weathered boat has at last reached the ocean. Dark clouds remain, but the water is still. The man is now old, and his gaze is fixed on the sky ahead, where the clouds are broken by glorious light, with angels moving to and fro.
For the first time since childhood, he can see the guardian who has been with him through the whole journey. The angel comes alongside him, points him towards the light and prepares him for his journey into heaven.
Cole's paintings remind us that God's presence does not depend on whether we can feel it. Even in the storms, when we cannot see him, he is watching over us.
Takeaway: In the storms of life God may seem absent, but he has been watching over us all along. One day we will see clearly how close he always was.
Source: Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life (1840; second version 1842).
Final thoughts
A note sewn into a coat, a diving dolphin, warriors who saw guards, a beach of crabs, spasms of grace, a grieving father and a painter's river. Each one asks us to trust that God is near, whether we can see him or not.
For further reading, Sopranu has a summary of C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed, an honest account of feeling God's absence, and a review of Laura Story's When God Doesn't Fix It.
When have you most clearly sensed God's presence?
More stories you may like:
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.
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