How to Experience God’s Presence in Everyday Life
At least for me, writing is an exercise in constant humiliation.
As soon as I think I have come up with an original, useful, or particularly profound idea to share, I inevitably discover it in someone else’s book a few weeks later, usually expressed with greater clarity and supported by several hundred footnotes. Such was the case as I began contemplating Advent through the lens of a word I have been using for some time: withness.
By withness, I mean the relational posture of being truly present with someone rather than acting on, over, or merely for them. It describes a way of relating marked by attention, affection, safety, and non-coercive presence, where influence flows through connection rather than control.
This is, after all, one of the primary themes of the Bible’s grand story. God is with humanity in a garden, humanity rejects His presence and attempts to go it alone, and God continues to express His desire to be with us through covenants, prophets, promises, and eventually His own arrival in human form.
He creates a new way for us to become human so that we can live with Him again, and the story eventually ends where it began, with God and humanity dwelling together in a garden city forever.
It is the most masterful of love stories.
Advent and Withness
The name Immanuel means “God with us,” but withness means more than occupying the same space.
Two people can live in the same house while remaining emotionally distant. They can sit across from each other at dinner while neither feels seen, known, or understood. Physical proximity alone does not create withness.
Perhaps withness is best pictured in the relationship between a doting mother and her infant. The child knows, long before she possesses language, that her mother is attentive, affectionate, and safe. They exchange loving gazes, physical touch, warmth, and an invisible but unmistakable connection.
The infant is not analyzing the relationship or constructing a doctrine of maternal care. She is experiencing a reality through her body, emotions, and emerging sense of self.
This heart-to-heart form of knowing seems central to discipleship, though I am not sure how many of us live in it with God.
When Paul prays that we might know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge so that we may be filled with all the fullness of God, he appears to be describing more than intellectual agreement. He is pointing toward an embodied, relational experience of God’s love, something like the peace and security of a child resting in the delight of a trustworthy parent.
Yet this ongoing experience of God is often missing from modern Christianity, which tends to elevate the head while quietly downgrading the heart.
I Told Me So
I keep a running list of books on Amazon that I intend to purchase eventually, though some have remained there for years. I received a gift card for my birthday and predictably selected a book from the list, even though I did not remember adding it or why it had interested me in the first place.
The book was Todd Hall’s Relational Spirituality, and it quickly became my latest source of writerly humiliation.
Hall describes what he calls a rationalistic paradigm of knowing God, ourselves, and others. He cites research showing that many churches operate from the assumption that the acquisition of biblical knowledge will, by itself, produce spiritual maturity.
That phrase—a rationalistic paradigm—captures the problem rather well.
Hall describes two primary forms of knowing. Explicit knowing refers to analytical, propositional knowledge, while implicit knowing refers to the intuitive, gut-level knowledge formed through relationships and experience.
We might call them theology and spirituality, or head and heart.
The head learns primarily through instruction. The heart learns through relationships and experience.
Modern discipleship has often concentrated almost exclusively on the first, ensuring that people possess correct doctrine, accurate language, and sufficient biblical information. Hall’s survey of church history suggests, however, that theology and spirituality were not always separated this way.
For much of the church’s first thousand years, knowledge of God and experience of God were considered intertwined and mutually dependent. Scholasticism began separating the two, and the Enlightenment completed the divorce.
We inherited the split.
What God Has Joined Together
We are invited, particularly during Advent, to explore how theology and spirituality might be reunited in our hearts and within our cultures.
This is no simple task because we are immersed in the rationalistic paradigm. We assume that knowledge becomes real when we can explain, define, categorize, and defend it.
To suggest that God desires us to experience Him throughout the ordinary course of life, with the inner security, affection, attunement, and freedom of a toddler resting in loving parents, can sound suspiciously sentimental.
It may even sound too good to be true.
Some of my Pentecostal friends might suggest that this is exactly what they experience during worship or an intense time of prayer, and indeed they may. But I am not primarily referring to event-driven or episodic encounters.
The toddlers I know are not normally concerned about what they will eat, drink, or wear. They do not spend their days wondering whether their parents will provide for them or carefully attend to their needs. Tantrums aside, they exist within a relational ecosystem in which they unconsciously assume that everything will be all right.
Because of that security, they are free to explore, play, wonder, wrestle, fall, laugh, and enjoy the beauty and goodness around them.
They experience their parents’ withness as an ongoing state of being.
The Head May Know While the Heart Doubts
Many of us consciously believe that God is present. We affirm that He loves us, cares for us, listens to us, and works for our good.
Yet our hearts may operate from another reality.
We may pray as though He is reluctant to respond. We may attempt to control circumstances because we do not feel safe in His care. We may interpret silence as absence, suffering as abandonment, and failure as evidence that He has withdrawn.
This is where the distinction between beliefs and ideas becomes important.
Our beliefs are the truths we consciously affirm. Our ideas are the deeper assumptions and experienced realities from which our hearts actually function. We may believe God is with us while living as though we are largely on our own.
That disconnect is one reason hidden ideas about God shape our spiritual lives so powerfully. The head may agree that God is present while the heart remains unconvinced.
My Long Struggle With Integration
Rejoining the head and heart has been a decades-long struggle for me, though I cringe even as I write the word struggle. I am not sure struggle is always God’s intent.
I wonder whether He has filled the earth with invitations to return to wholeness, integration, and contentment, invitations to reunite what our cultures have separated. Perhaps He is continually inviting us not only to affirm that He is with us but to exist in that reality in the deepest places of the soul.
In some ways, this is an invitation to return to childhood, though not necessarily the childhood some of us experienced. I mean the secure, flourishing childhood that was never intended to remain merely an idealized picture.
A child who feels safe does not have to manufacture trust. Trust emerges from repeated experiences of care, consistency, presence, and delight.
Perhaps our hearts learn to trust God in much the same way.
Returning to Immanuel
If we accept this premise, an obvious question emerges: How do we experience God’s presence as a consistent and internalized reality?
We are rationalists, after all, so naturally we ask, “How?”
But I am not sure that is the best question.
If the heart learns through relationship and experience, is there really a seven-step method or easy-to-follow protocol that can cause it to embrace something the head already knows? We are not blank slates. We are wounded, distracted, disappointed, and often disoriented adults.
Can we truly return to the safety, rest, and security of a flourishing child? Can we, to use a phrase so often reduced and abused, be born again?
Perhaps the question is not primarily How?
Perhaps it is Who?
Who is Immanuel, not merely intellectually, but relationally and experientially? If His deepest desire is to be with us, is He continually making loving overtures that we ignore, resist, or simply fail to notice?
How God May Be Inviting Us
God extends His invitations through both of His books, Scripture and creation.
We encounter His character in the biblical story, where His desire to dwell with people appears again and again. We may sense His delight through prayer, worship, beauty, silence, suffering, gratitude, and the ordinary surprises of daily life.
Yet it seems to me that He may invite us most passionately and consistently through other people.
If our hearts are formed most powerfully through relationships, it follows that human beings may become some of God’s most precious pathways back toward trust, childlike wonder, and withness.
I grant that we may not appear to be the best candidates for such a vulnerable assignment, but God is nothing if not a risk-taker.
He entrusts His presence to people who are distracted, wounded, selfish, impatient, and frequently unsure of what to say. Yet He continues inviting us to embody His attention, kindness, and care for one another.
How Did They Experience Me?
I am not convinced that God extends His Immanuel invitations primarily through words and information, at least not as much as we often imagine.
I may wonder whether my words affected a person, whether my explanation was clear, or whether I defended something accurately. But perhaps the better question is, How did they experience me?
Was I attentive to their heart? Was I gentle, humble, patient, and kind? Did they experience me as safe, hurried, controlling, interested, distracted, or present?
Even if the conversation was simple and shallow, did they experience something of God’s withness in the way I engaged them?
This is one reason presence is essential to spiritual formation. A person may forget our words while remembering how their soul felt in our presence.
Becoming Accurate or Becoming Loving?
This reflection has led me to ask myself a rather uncomfortable question: Is following Jesus primarily about becoming the most accurate person in the room, or becoming the most loving?
The two should not be separated. Truth and love belong together, just as theology and spirituality belong together. Accuracy matters because false ideas about God and human life can wound people profoundly.
Still, if Todd Hall is correct and we inhabit a rationalistic paradigm, our desire for theological precision may often exceed our desire to attend to human hearts.
Theological perfection is not possible in any case. There are too many mysteries, paradoxes, questions, and limitations confronting finite people. That does not make theology unimportant. It remains one of the highest and most worthwhile pursuits available to us.
But perhaps God did not give us His books primarily so that we could win arguments or claim accuracy.
Perhaps He gave them so that we might fall more deeply in love with Him, experience His presence, and become capable of extending that presence to others.
Experiencing God’s Presence in Ordinary Life
We may miss God’s presence because we expect it to arrive in unusual or dramatic ways.
We imagine a powerful worship service, a sudden revelation, a mystical encounter, or an unmistakable answer to prayer. Those moments may occur, but they are not the only forms His withness takes.
God may be present in a friend who listens without trying to fix us, a meal shared slowly, a walk taken without a phone, a moment of beauty we almost ignored, or an unexpected sense of comfort during grief.
He may meet us through the laughter of a child, the steadiness of a spouse, the patience of a counselor, the care of a community, or the quiet realization that we have not been abandoned.
The practice may not be forcing ourselves to feel God but becoming more attentive to how He is already making Himself known.
This is closely related to learning how to hear God, because hearing Him often begins with presence, attention, and the willingness to notice rather than striving for certainty.
The Importance of Trusted Community
The experience of Immanuel is rarely meant to remain private.
God’s presence is often mediated through trusted relationships in which we are known, received, challenged, comforted, and enjoyed. This is why our communities must be more than a gathering around information.
We need relationships in which enough time, safety, intimacy, and attentiveness exist for our hearts to become visible.
A person may affirm God’s love for decades and still struggle to experience it. But the repeated presence of people who remain kind, attentive, honest, and faithful can help truth travel from the head into the heart.
This is part of the Formation Gap. Instruction is necessary, but our hearts also need time, habits, community, intimacy, and experiences that make God’s character believable.
Living From Withness
To experience God’s presence does not mean we remain emotionally peaceful every hour of the day or never struggle with doubt, anxiety, or grief.
It means we increasingly learn to interpret our lives from the reality that we are accompanied.
We may suffer, but we are not abandoned. We may be confused, but we are not alone. We may fail, but His presence does not disappear. We may not understand what He is doing, but we gradually learn that we are living within His attention and care.
The Good Life with God is not a life free from hardship. It is life with God in the middle of reality, where His presence becomes a deeper source of security than our circumstances.
Over time, this withness may allow us to become less anxious, controlling, hurried, and self-protective. We become more available to love because we no longer feel responsible for holding the universe together.
Merry Immanuel
My hope this Advent is not merely that we remember the doctrine of the Incarnation, as essential as that doctrine is.
My hope is that we increasingly experience its reality.
God is with us, not only in the abstract, not only in history, and not only in the future. He is present in the ordinary, relational, embodied moments of our lives.
May we know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, not by abandoning theology, but by allowing truth to reach the hidden places of our hearts.
May we recover the rest and inner security of a flourishing child who knows they are seen, delighted in, and safe.
May we become attentive to God’s loving overtures through Scripture, creation, prayer, silence, suffering, beauty, and one another.
And may the people around us experience something of Immanuel through the way they experience us.
Merry Immanuel.
Duc in altum.
Brian Fisher is the founder of Soil & Roots and the author of Soil & Roots: Cultivating Deep Discipleship. He writes and speaks about spiritual formation, the inner life, and how people become more like Jesus from the inside out.
Explore Further
Why Presence Is Essential to Spiritual Formation
