When God Isn't There: Why God Is Farther than You Think but Closer than You Dare Imagine

by David Bowden

Overview

Why does God feel so far away? Why is my worship so empty? Has God left me?

David Bowden knows these questions firsthand, having wrestled for years with God’s apparent absence and studying what the Bible says about it. In this new book, Bowden tackles the subject head-on, finding the key to understanding it in the Bible’s depiction of a God who is infinitely far from us, free to move where he wants, but who chooses to come near in the person of Jesus.

A resource of encouragement for those who struggle with feeling God’s absence and a wake-up call to those who take God’s presence for granted, When God Isn’t There will forever change your understanding of why God sometimes seems to vanish and how he can be found again.

Praise for the work of David Bowden

“Awesome and inspiring.”—Blake Mycoskie, Founder and Chief Shoe Giver at TOMS Shoes

 

“David brings a fresh, engaging and highly impactful approach to Scripture. His passion for the Word is both contagious and inspirational.”

—Roy Peterson, President of American Bible Society

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780718077686
Publisher:	Zondervan
Publication date:	10/11/2016
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishing
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	390 KB

About the Author

David Bowden is the cofounder and executive director of Spoken Gospel, a nonprofit dedicated to creating free resources that help people encounter Jesus in all of Scripture. He is a spoken word poet and the author of When God Isn’t There and Rewire Your Heart. David lives in Oklahoma City, where he and his wife, Meagan, are raising two boys, Ezra and Eli.

Read an Excerpt

When God Isn't There

Why God Is Farther Than You Think, But Closer Than You Dare Imagine

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By David Bowden

Thomas Nelson

Copyright © 2016 David Bowden
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7180-7768-6

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CHAPTER 1

HUMMERS AND BIRTHSTONES

Why does God feel so absent?

He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God's work from beginning to end.

— Ecclesiastes 3:11 (NLT)

I was speaking at a conference in Tennessee where about twenty-two thousand teenagers were gathered to worship God and hear lessons from his Word. If you've ever been to anything like this, you may know how encouraging it is to be completely surrounded by so many like-minded people who are proclaiming the same truths as you. However, you may also know how alone you can feel when everyone around you seems to be fully convinced and content in their praise, while you feel detached and dissatisfied in yours. Such was the case for a seventeen-year-old girl named Natalie who approached me after I spoke.

I had just finished performing a poem on stage and had made my way back to my booth to chat with some of the teens. Without a preamble, handshake, or pleasantry, Natalie came right up to me and asked, "How do you know God is real?" Due to the suddenness and depth of the question, I was a little rattled.

After gaining my composure, I sought to garner a little more insight. "Why do you ask?" I questioned back.

Her response crystallized in my mind a key aspect of God's absence. Eyes replete with both conviction and sorrow, Natalie said, "Everyone is in there singing about how they can see and feel the glory of God. But all I see is a stadium and all I feel is absence." Natalie, in her pain and honesty, boldly articulated the ache many of us hide in our hearts. God feels absent. Sometimes it feels like God isn't there.

Perhaps you are like Natalie in some way. You may not feel like you are connecting with the most high God when you go to church on Sunday. You may hear all the songs and the messages being proclaimed, yet feel like you are missing out on something so obvious. "What's wrong with me?" is more often on your lips than the worship songs.

But what if feeling God's absence could be a faith builder instead of a faith breaker? What if noticing how far God feels proves his nearness? What if seeing the space between God and us led to longing instead of despair? That's what I was able to share with Natalie.

I asked her if she owned a big pink Hummer. She clearly thought I was going way off topic and exasperatedly answered, "No."

I then proceeded to ask her a few hypothetical questions. "Imagine someone runs up to you, out of breath and deeply concerned, to tell you that your big pink Hummer was just stolen. What would your response be?"

She looked at me like it was the dumbest question she had ever been asked, but kindly played along. "I would tell them that I don't own a big pink Hummer," she replied.

"Would you be concerned or feel like you lost something that you once had?" I asked.

"No," she said, "I wouldn't care at all. I would just think they had me mistaken for someone else."

So far so good.

"Now," I continued with Natalie, "what is your most treasured and prized possession?"

She let the question sink in. I could tell she was taking this question quite seriously. I could see her mind's eye poring over every corner of her bedroom, closet, backpack, car, and locker. When her mind lighted upon the idea, I could see it in her eyes.

"I have a birthstone," she began. "My mom gave it to me." She hesitated, then said, "I live with my grandparents now." I could get the rest of the story from context. This stone was the only memento she had left to remember her late mother. "I keep the birthstone in a wooden box on my dresser. Every morning when I wake up, I open the box, take out my birthstone, and hold it for a few seconds before putting it back and closing the lid."

I wish you could have seen the sparkle in her eyes as she described her greatest treasure. It was almost as if I could see the stone she was describing just by looking at the marvel it held in her eyes.

"Now," I continued more slowly, "what would happen if that same person came up to you and told you the birthstone from the box on your dresser was missing?"

The hypothetical thought alone must have made her heart icy and her once shining eyes cold.

"I would be devastated," she confessed.

I pressed the point, "Why would you be devastated over the birthstone but not over the big pink Hummer?"

Natalie looked as if I had asked her why she would be devastated if her unicorn went missing instead of one of her grandparents. "Because I actually have my birthstone. I would never even want a Hummer."

I smiled just a little bit and said softly, "Then why are you so surprised that you are devastated over feeling God's absence?"

The way her eyes lit back up immediately told me she understood my point.

God felt absent because he is real. Natalie couldn't have felt the absence of the big pink Hummer because she never had the big pink Hummer. However, she could easily understand what it would feel like to lose her birthstone because she once had and treasured her birthstone.

Using this example, Natalie was able to see that she couldn't feel devastated by God's absence unless she had once treasured his presence. Instead of her feelings of distance and loss being clues to God's nonexistence, these became foundations upon which she could prove to herself that God not only exists, but exists in relation to her specifically.

Natalie was able to see that when something treasured is lost, the longing for the lost treasure makes it impossible to say you never possessed it in the first place. There was a supreme groaning of loss, anger, and fear in Natalie's soul because her supreme treasure was not in the place she had found it before. God felt absent because God was once present.

Absence Proves Presence

Absence isn't the same thing as nonexistence. Something that does not exist cannot be absent, since it was never present to begin with. And here's a key to the relationship between absence and presence: the more profound the presence, the more painful the absence. The heavier foot leaves a deeper track. The weight of God's presence leaves footprints on the soft soil of hearts that belong to him.

Therefore, if God is feeling absent in your life, let this be an encouragement to you that he very much exists and can very much be found. Perhaps the deep tracks left by God that feel like absence are really meant to be a trail we are to follow in order to find his presence once again.

As Samuel Rutherford, the powerful seventeenth-century preacher, put it, "I think the sense of our wants, when withal we have a restlessness and a sort of spiritual impatience under them ... is that which maketh an open door for Christ: and when we think we are going backward, because we feel deadness, we are going forward; for the more sense the more life, and no sense argueth no life."

After all, the desires we have are placed in our hearts for a reason. We hunger because there is food. We thirst because there is water. We feel God's absence because he truly exists and we are designed to be near him. Only God can satisfy our longings for God.

As C. S. Lewis famously put it, "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." Feeling God's absence is not cause for shame and doubt but cause for pursuit.

Tracking Down Our Absent God

This is not a self-help book. You will not find "The Ten Steps to Feeling God's Presence" in these pages because such steps don't exist. This is also not a book about fighting off absence in order to get presence. Instead, between these covers you will find out how to understand absence. By changing your understanding of God's absence, many things in your life will change as a consequence.

You will finally figure out how God can be everywhere at once and yet extremely far. You will see why it is that the more of God you get, the more of God you want. You will learn what it means to search for an invisible and absent God. You will place this gap of thousands of years between Jesus' first coming and his second coming in its proper light. You will come to grips with why it is good news that God is present in suffering. You will discover what God may be up to in your life if you are experiencing a dark night of the soul.

Experiencing the presence of God here and now will not be served up on a silver platter at the end of this book. I fear that such an endeavor would defame the glory of God and claim that I — a sinful, earthly author — am able to put a leash around the Almighty. Since such an impossible and ill-guided search is not the intent of this book, I want to invite you deeper into God's absence. I want to beckon you to step more fully into what you do not know.

God is hiding in absence. God is waiting in darkness. God uses distance for good purposes. No matter where you are on the spectrum of experiencing God's presence and absence, you desperately need to grapple with this topic. Whether God feels incredibly close or hopelessly far, a fuller experience of God's absence will reveal mysteries to you that you didn't even know existed. Welcome to the inevitable and impossible search for our absent God.

CHAPTER 2

TRASH BAG COVERED WALLS

Why does God have to be absent?

The creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it.

— Romans 8:20

The first time I experienced God's absence was actually one of the most profound experiences of his presence I've ever had. I remember the setting of that moment clearly. The walls of the tiny room corralling my fellow sixth graders and me were covered with thick black trash bags. A few muted red stage lights made the room feel like a mystic cave partially lit by two rubies. Artificial smoke spewed from the front-right corner of the room in rhythm with a faint hissing sound. The room was hot.

We had just finished two hours of recreation under a triple-digit Oklahoma sun, and the Hefty bags did little to improve the room's already anemic ventilation. Above the door leading into the room was a huge wooden sign with the words Red 2 written in what looked like bloody war paint. We were like the enslaved Hebrews from the book of Exodus entering through the crimson-soaked doors of our homes before the angel of death made its way through the camps of Egypt. This was my very first youth camp.

The students were split up by grades. Each grade was assigned a color, and each color was broken into different groups and given a number. The sixth grade was assigned the color red, and I was drafted into group two. Every group was given their own room in which they met, sang songs, and received announcements and instructions. But these were not felt-board, Bible-poster, Sunday school classrooms. These rooms were decked out in a wide range of themes. I don't remember Red 2's theme, but I do remember the trash bags on the walls and one particularly warm evening of worship.

The Hefty sacks provided a cheap and quick solution to cover up whatever droll wallpaper or distracting signage hung on the walls before the camp began. The strategy was successful. The room was dark and insular. It wasn't creepy, but it did feel secluded. The red lights and fog machine added to the reflective ambience and made us eager sixth-graders feel as if we were in on something forbidden and foreboding.

As we funneled into the room and took our spots in the many rows of chairs, music began to play from somewhere between the room's two ruby-red eyes of gel-screened lights, about six or seven feet away from the fog machine, hissing like a snake in the corner. Over the fog machine, the band began to play a song we were all familiar with. The tune had been taking over radio time in cars and stage time in churches for months now. It had become a sort of anthem for the camp, and especially for Red 2. The opening notes of the song began, and the plastic, cavernous room seemed to swallow me up and I experienced one of my young life's most profound moments of reflection.

MercyMe's "I Can Only Imagine" began. I remember being overcome with the idea of standing in the presence of God. I closed my eyes and pictured what it would be like to stand before God face-to-face. Just chubby, awkward, sixth-grade David in his puka shell necklace, standing before the Almighty. David before God. Mortal before divine.

What would I do? I didn't know. What would it be like? I couldn't even imagine. My eyes filled with tears and my young heart found a surprising new hunger. I wanted to see God. I wanted to be in his presence. Ache filled me as I hurt with this new desire. I didn't want to feel God, I wanted to behold him. I wanted to see him with my own eyes, just as he is. This moment of worship was fantastic, but it wasn't good enough. I wanted God. No substitutes. No mediators. Not one inch of space between him and me. I wanted to be in the presence of the one and only God.

When I opened my eyes to the ruby lights, hissing fog, and Hefty bags, I didn't see God; I only saw a bunch of other sixth graders in their chairs. Disappointment flooded my heart. I wanted to do more than just "imagine" being with God. I wanted to be with God. But the thick, dark plastic seemed to choke out the possibility. The black trash bags weren't just covering the walls; they were forming a blockade, keeping my body trapped in the room with all the heat and sweat brought in from our recreation.

My skin seemed to be made out of the stuff as well. Plastic skin, holding my soul within my flesh like the plastic wallpaper, was holding my body within the room. I wanted to shred them both. Peel off skin and undress walls until I was out of this world and in the presence of God. But there was space between God and me. How could a desire so deep have been awakened and a moment so rich have been lived, only to open my eyes to the same world I left when I shut them?

Unfortunately, neither the bags nor the heavens were ripped open during the last few days of church camp. Neither have they torn open for me at any of the camps, conferences, church services, late-night prayer sessions, multiday fasts, or exquisite worship experiences I've been a part of ever since.

Maybe you have had an experience like this as well. You have closed your eyes in rapturous wonder at the majesty of God, only to open them again to your old habitat of absence. What is the one experience in your life that has opened you up to the presence of God the most? What was the room like? What sounds were there? Was it a song, a sermon, a poem, or a view that broke your heart open like the thin skin of a water balloon? What did you feel after the moment was over? How long did the moment stick with you? Many of us have had these moments of presence, only to be left with spans of absence.

I had a moment within those trash bag covered walls that set a fire in my heart that no experience on this earth has been able to quench. I wanted to be in God's immediate presence. But that presence has been blocked by the plastic barrier of this flesh and this world. God was absent to me in the way I most desired him to be present. God was absent in the way I most desired because his full and immediate presence was not before me. But that does not mean that God was not present with me at all. He was present with me in the way I most needed in that moment.

This is the truth of absence and presence that every single person lives and wrestles with: God is absent in the way we most desire, but present in the way we most require.

Desired Presence. Required Presence.

That really is the shortest way to sum up the meaning of this book, so I will say it again for good measure: God is absent in the way we most desire, but present in the way we most require. But this truth demands that we understand something right away. God can be present in more ways than one, and God can be absent in more ways than one. What kind of presence are we talking about when we say that God is absent in the way we most desire? What mode of God's presence do we desire most?

The answer is simple. We most desire God's actual presence. God's actual presence is the face-to- face, unencumbered, completely revealed and unmediated form of his presence. This is the presence the Bible promises to those who believe in Jesus. The promise speaks of a day when we will live with God and be his people. This type of God's presence has been his plan and promise throughout all time. This is not to say that the other ways in which God is present are fake or fraudulent, only lesser by degree. So when I talk about the presence we most desire or the absence we most profoundly experience, I am usually referring to God's actual nearness. Actual presence is presence desired.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from When God Isn't There by David Bowden. Copyright © 2016 David Bowden. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction, xi,
SECTION 1: WHY GOD ISN'T THERE, 1,
Chapter 1: Hummers and Birthstones Why does God feel so absent?, 5,
Chapter 2: Trash Bag Covered Walls Why does God have to be absent?, 11,
Chapter 3: God: Absent and Everywhere Isn't God always present?, 29,
SECTION 2: CHASING OUR ABSENT GOD, 41,
Chapter 4: The Moses Principle: More Wants More Why does God feel farther the closer I get?, 45,
Chapter 5: The Far-Off Promises of an Elusive God Why must Christians wait?, 61,
Chapter 6: Sick with Love How do I search for a God who is absent?, 81,
SECTION 3: THE CHURCH AND GOD'S PRESENCE, 99,
Chapter 7: When God stops Coming to Church If God left, would you notice?, 103,
Chapter 8: Where Two or Three Are Gathered Where is God in worship?, 123,
SECTION 4: AFFLICTION, ABANDONMENT, AND ABSENCE, 137,
Chapter 9: Presence in suffering Is God present when we suffer?, 141,
Chapter 10: That safe Darkness Where is God in the darkness?, 161,
SECTION 5: THE GOSPEL OF NEARNESS, 175,
Chapter 11: God with us How should I understand the presence of Jesus?, 179,
Chapter 12: Present for absence HOW did Jesus defeat absence?, 193,
Chapter 13: The spirit and absence Is God absent if he lives in me?, 211,
Chapter 14: sooner Than We deserve, but Not as soon as We Desire What will eternal presence and absence be like?, 231,
Acknowledgments, 247,
Notes, 249,
About the Author, 258,