The 6 Ways We Relate to God

The experience of being out of harmony with God’s loving Presence. It’s the pain others have inflicted on us by not welcoming us (as they should) into their groups or friendship, and the pain we experience when others purposefully or unconsciously abuse us. This pain comes from outside as some kind of attack, or as a pulling away – others from us or us from others – that leaves us alone and lonely. Pain also comes from inside us—the deep, burning shame-pain of realizing how w e have unconsciously or deliberately abused and used others, and that fearful pain that our behavior will become known and we will experience even more pain. There is also a deeper, often hidden, pain of depression, hopelessness, and aching despair that comes through experiences that tell us there is no ultimate purpose to our lives. We are haunted by the feeling that there is something more to life that we do not have.

The experience of encountering someone or something that is “richer” than you.To experience God is to experience something (Someone!) incomparably “richer” than we are. The first experience of the Presence so often always leaves us feeling poor, and with the pain of knowing we’re poor. God, in the many ways He can be present to us, comes to us, and the experience is so sweet, so good, so overwhelming, so short in duration, so shocking and not seldom shame-tinted, so full of truth and goodness that it leaves us wanting more. At the same time, His Presence is often so scary, so confrontational, so unusual, so uncontrollable, and so wild that we aren’t sure we really want more. And yet we do. For an instant, sometimes longer, we are so rich in His Presence. Then He seems to disappear and we feel so poor. Having tasted the sweetest honey wine, plain tap water now seems flat, empty.

Is part surrender ceremony and part discovery of a new continent you never knew existed. It is learning to deactivate the shields, to surrender and allow God to be present however He wants. It is to admit to the feelings and reality of the Ways of Pain and Poverty, as much as possible at any one time, and to purposefully begin to welcome and pursue the Presence.  Staying in the Presence is to become the new normal, though never tame or mundane. As living in the Presence becomes the focus for your life, you enter a cooler, gentler, and usually more sustainable kind of experience. You discover that while God is never totally absent, His presence with you is now at your invitation. To some degree, you set the pace of what happens. And what happens, amazingly enough, is an ascent out of the Ways of Pain and Poverty by going through them again and again and responding to what the Presence offers. This ascent is the Way of Purity.

In the Way of Purity, God uses the Ways of Pain and Poverty like a spade to break up rock-hard ground of our self-grown heart and will so it can finally grow good stuff. Or, to borrow a biblical metaphor, the Way of Purity is like a smelting furnace that burns the gold and silver free from the trash rocks in your life. Now, when you’re in the Presence, you don’t run from Pain and Poverty in shame and terror like you used to do. Instead, you’re learning that these former enemies have now become your allies, God’s tools or instruments to free you from the deeply encrusted beliefs you picked up in life and developed into your own private “shops of horrors.”

In the Way of Power, you experience God’s own power come through you so that you love others in a way that produces effects way beyond what you would be able to pull off alone. Power comes from being “with” God. His knowledge and ability to make stuff happen are available to you because He is with you. It’s always His power, but part of the package deal of knowing God is that He lets you use it. The more you love and trust Him, the more His life, which is another way of talking about His power, is accessible to you. The love part is very important, because our love for God, fed by His incredible love for us, is like a set of secret lenses that lets us “see” stuff about x or y and then also actually do x or y.

God is most interested in setting you free and setting you up to be His Partner. From His first interactions with His human creations, God has always been about making people fit to be His “partners in business.” What we know about God from the Bible and from the collective experience of believers through the centuries is that God Himself is a kind of three-way partnership, a community of three that is one. So it fits perfectly with God’s own nature that He would somehow include others into His beloved community. This is what the Bible calls becoming a child of God—you share in the family business!