Unforgetting God

I once heard Dallas Willard interviewed at a California congregation.  He was speaking about the way that intolerable times of pain become unexpected times of praise by experiencing the presence of God within them.  Willard said “Experiencing the presence of God in one’s life is something you’ve got to have before you need it, like water before a fire.”  If you wait for a fire to spark before you secure water, you’re too late.  In the same way, if you wait for pain to hit before you cultivate an ongoing sense of the presence of God in your life, you’re too late.  Willard stressed that we must constantly “practice the presence of God.”  Throughout every day we must nurture a conviction that God is with us.  Then, when we encounter times which suggest God is not present, our minds and hearts will know better.

But how do we do this?  How do we nurture a constant sense of the companionship of God in our lives?  A recent conversation in a church hallway with four friends focused on this very question.  Cary told about an overseas flight he took to Ukraine.  Hours into the flight, he left his seat and walked the aisles to exercise his legs.  Eventually he bumped into a man who was exercising his soul.  The man, clasping a small prayer rug, was a Muslim seeking someplace on the airplane to engage in “salat.”  Like one-and-a-half billion Muslims worldwide, this traveler was dedicated to an exercise of praying five times each day.  Even on an international flight, he was trying to tend to this prayerful practice.  While “salat” serves many purposes, above all, it simply reminds the one praying that God is present and that God seeks ongoing interaction.  In a CNN profile on this practice, one Muslim shared: “It reminds you about God throughout your day.  At fixed intervals, no matter how busy you are, all of a sudden you have to take out a few minutes and you’re remembering, OK, why am I really here?”[i] After Cary shared this story, my friend Joe remarked, “I need something like that.  I know when I’m working it’s hard for me to think about anything but work.  I need something that reminds me of God throughout the day.”

Can you connect with his statement?  We so often forget God during our day.  We need some way to unforget God.  Some way to turn our mind back to him when our thoughts have wandered from him.  Some way, as Brother Lawrence counseled, to “Forget him the very least you can.”[ii]

This is one of the provisions of the Examen.  It creates a structure through which we are not only reminded of God through the day, but we are guided, in very specific ways, to interact deeply and significantly with God throughout the day.  Whether it is practiced twice-a-day (e.g., morning and noon), or three-times-a-day (e.g., morning, noon, and evening), the Examen pauses all other activity and invites us to drink deeply of God and his Spirit.

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[ii] Brother Lawrence & Frank Laubach, Practicing His Presence The Library of Spiritual Classics, Volume 1 (Christian Books Publishing House, 1988), 91.