Early Morning Abide

Early Morning Abide
by Karen Kornelsen, Ministry Leader

I’m sitting in the early morning dark of my bedroom.  I woke up long before my alarm, with my mind racing, and so much to do.  Two papers due in the next few days that I haven’t even started, emails in my inbox, prep for an upcoming training, a teaching to put together for ReGen next week… and the list goes on.  My first thought was to just start digging into my work for the day, to get a head start, but a voice in my soul said “come and sit with me”.  I have never once regretted listening to this particular voice.  It has become a familiar and constant companion.  I opened my worship playlist, and sat in the dark, as I listened to the melody coming from the speaker across the room.  My body and mind were agitated – thinking about all that needed to be done.  It was a fight to keep focused on the music drifting around me, and I found my mind wandering – wondering when to break away and start digging into my first paper.  My body was sitting, but my mind was struggling to abide.  As a track ended, I decided I’d listen to one more song of worship, and then it would be time to get up and get going with my day.

In the brief quiet before the last song, as I was trying to focus in on the Lord, I sensed His gentle voice, “I see you sitting with me.”  But I wasn’t doing a very good job of it, I protested inwardly.  My mind was all over the place and I was struggling to focus on Him.  I was falling short of complete devotion.

But I was there.  My human brain was distracted, but I was still sitting.  Trying.  And He was there.  The first notes of Shane and Shane’s Draw me Close broke through the silence and began to reverberate through my being.  “Draw me close to you”.  I wanted that so desperately – to be close to the Lord.  To feel His presence.  To know that He was near.  Right there, in that moment, an overwhelming sense of His presence came over me and I dropped to my knees.  My scattered brain and agitated body were instantaneously connected to my source of strength and hope.  I put the song on repeat, and spent some beautiful minutes connected.  Whole.

As I knelt there in my bedroom, I began to wonder.  This last year I have gone from knowing God intellectually, to experiencing a deeply personal and loving God who sits with me in the wee hours of the morning, even when my mind and body are unsettled, and draws me close to Himself.  How did this change happen?  In the last few days I have had several people ask me the same question.  How do we go from a head knowledge of God, to experiencing Him in a deeply personal way?  Those I interact with have expressed a desire to experience Him on that level, but they don’t know how to get there.  I have gotten there, but how do I help them?  Is that something that I can teach, or model or encourage in them?  How does that change happen?  I have all sorts of answers from a psychological perspective, but are those really answers?  My knowledge of mental health seems almost trivial as I contemplate this, and even my knowledge of the Bible seems heady.  How can I use scripture – the perfect words of God – to help others to experience this deeply personal God in the way that I have this past year?  How did I get there myself?

I didn’t get there myself.  I tried for years to get there myself.  It didn’t happen.  I got there because Jesus chose to change me.  I got there with the help of others, as we walked together in vulnerability.  I got there as I spent time just sitting with God.  Not because I always wanted to stay there.  Not because I always had time to sit.  But because He wanted me there.  With Him.  And I stayed.  He wanted me to experience Him, even more than I wanted it.  He wanted me to be connected with Him, more than I wanted it.  He wants to be with me – much more intensely and intentionally than I want it.  Daily, over the course of last year, I sat with Him and asked Him to show me more of who He is.  And He met me - with an experiential love.