The past couple weeks or so have been really rich with God, in practising and cultivating his presence in my life. It has not been full of spiritual ecstacy or indescribable holy euphoria, (although there were short moments were that arguably seemed the case). It has, instead, been different.
After all this hard work of trying to keep an existential awareness of God throughout every moment of my life since March 2009, I sense another breakthrough.
God just simply feels "closer". Now this feels like a different type of "closeness" than what people (or at least myself) normally mean when they say "I feel close to God". I am not talking about having intense emotional experiences where one feels intensely intimate with God, whether through corporate ecstatic worship (i.e. Hillsong concerts), or crazy/supernatural phenomena happening in my personal devo. This type of "closeness" I have been experiencing lately is not closeness in terms of the depth of intimacy two friends experience when having many warm encounters within a set time period, and how one feels emotionally "closer" to another friend. The type of closeness I'm talking about feels somewhat akin to closeness in "physical proximity", just like how someone can stand apart from you in a room at different distances. For example, the "emotional closeness" between a couple could be very emotionally intimate, but if they are both in a big room, their physical proximity from each other can vary at different times during a time period, let's say at a social gathering or party. On a certain night, the "emotional closeness" could remain the same, while the "physical proximity closeness" could differ throughout the night (e.g. when both are going around, doing different things, talking to different people, going to the washroom etc.)
It is this latter type of "closeness" that I am beginning to feel with God. In a spiritual sense, he is feeling more and more closer in "spiritual proximity" as opposed to "emotional intimacy". It is weird. It feels as if a new continuum/guage of the former just recently formed itself in my spiritual consciousness that has previously never existed (or at least I was never previously aware of it) before. Although sometimes I don't have intense spiritually euphoric moments with God in the latter guage/continuum, with respect to the former, I still feel he is more closer in "spiritual distnace rather than emotional distance. It is just like how me and my human best friend can feel different distances in physical proximity at a party even though at different moments I feel different levels of friendship intimacy with him.
It is starting to get to the point where if I guage whether or not I was in the presence of God or not during a certain time (i.e. 9am-10am), I would guage whether or not we were both present in the same place, rather than guage whether or not we had mutually strong emotional experiences during that time period (of 9am-10am). Just like how if you were to ask me if I met with my dentist and was in my dentist's presence this morning, I would either say "yes, I went to his clinic and saw him, and we interacted with each other" but I wouldn't say "yes, I had an intense emotional experience full of intimacy with him." I either experienced him in his presence or I didn't. Just like that.
When the Bible talks about different chracters (i.e. David, Paul, John etc.) exhorting others to "come near to God" or "pursue and run towards God" or "come close to him", perhaps they sometimes are talking about "objective spiritual distance" between God in addition to emotional distance with God. Just perhaps. I am not an expert on exegesis/hermeneutics so I am not sure. All I know is that I am starting to detect a difference in kind/quality in my spiritual intuition with God lately.
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