The Lord is known by names such as Jehovah Shammah (The Lord who is present) and Emmanuel (God with Us). He cherishes fellowship with man who he has created. In John 14:23, we find Jesus telling his disciples, "If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him." In Rev 3:20, John is told by the Lord to write to the church in Laodicea, "Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me." Imagine Jesus dining with you inside your humble home, talking with you, always available for help in your difficult circumstances. What an encouragement such a presence will be?
One finds this blessedness in the serenity at the Home for the Dying and the Destitute, run by Mother Teresa and her nuns. The sisters rise long before the sun, at 4 o'clock in the morning, awakened by a bell and the call, "Let us bless the Lord". "Thanks be to God", they 
reply and file into the chapel, where they sit on the floor and sing and pray together. They immerse themselves in worship and in the love of God, before they meet the first needy. They begin their day with God and end their day with him back in the chapel for night prayers; and offer everything in between as an offering to God. God alone determines their worth and measures their success. Philip Yancey notes in Reaching for the Invisible God, "If I tackled such a daunting project, I would likely be scurrying about, faxing press releases to donors, begging for more resources, gulping tranquilizers, grasping at ways to cope with my mounting desperation. Not these nuns."
We find that heroes in the Bible had this experience. The weeping prophet Jeremiah, who prophesied to the people of Judah in the last 40 years of its history, and who lived to see the Babylonian invasion that resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, realized what kept him while there were afflictions all around. "Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, "The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him. The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord." (Lam 3:23-26) God told the Israelites through Prophet Isaiah, "Seek the Lord while he may be found; call on him while he is near" and in Proverbs 8:17 "those that seek me early shall find me (KJV)."
There are however challenges in meeting with an invisible God. What we see hits us very hard that it is difficult for us to think of the Invisible God. Distractions push God away from our consciousness altogether. C. S. Lewis points out how the way we live keeps us from sensing God's presence. "Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you must read books, select them very carefully. But you'd be safer to stick to the papers." He also offered help. "What is concrete but immaterial can be kept in view only by painful effort. That is why the real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of you, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day . . . We can do it only for moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our systems because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us."
If we can wait for God in solitude and in silence, we can hear God whispering in our hearts. Jesus had this experience of rising up in the silence of the wee hours of the morning, and going out in solitude to pray and to be in His father’s company. We find in Mark 1:35, “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.” While starting a new day, following a very busy day, he knew that this was the way to restore him.
He knew the promise in Isa 40:31, “but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”
The eagle is a powerful bird with very large hooked beaks for tearing flesh from their prey, strong muscular legs, and powerful talons claws. It has very good eyesight with a resolving power 8 times more powerful than a human and can spot prey from a long distance. This keen eyesight is primarily contributed by their extremely large pupils that ensure minimal diffraction (scattering) of the incoming light. It has long and broad wings, and a direct fast flight in which it can quickly swoop down and pick its prey. It is a powerful flier, and soars on thermal convection currents. It may ascend in a thermal and then glide down, or may ascend in updrafts created by the wind against a cliff or other terrain. It reaches speeds of 56–70 kilometers per hour when gliding and flapping, and about 48 kilometers per hour while carrying 
prey. Its dive speed is between 120–160 kilometers per hour. It lives for 30 to 50 years and it is fascinating to learn how the Eagle grows in strength with passing years. Every year between April and July (which may sometime extend all the way from March to October) it loses a third of its feathers through a process known as molting, when it slows down and waits to get new ones and fly again with renewed strength. We too can grow in strength like an eagle, if only we will wait on the Lord each morning.Paul compares the Christian life to a (marathon) race in his letter to the Corinthians. "Everyone who competes in the games go into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever." (I Cor 9:25) Philip Yancey notes how we live in a society that honors professional football players who work out with weights five hours a day and undergo a dozen knee and shoulder surgeries to repair the damage they inflict on themselves in the sport, and yet cannot comprehend those who fast or carve out two hours for a quiet time. He writes, “Love is what God wants from a relationship with us, but we humans tend to experience love like any emotion: intermittently, waxing and waning. Discipline nurtures in us a spiritual staying power - the kind of love a couple enjoys on their golden anniversary, not at their wedding."
Brother Lawrence, a cook in a seventeenth century monastery, has explained his spiritual discipline in a devotional classic The Practice of the Presence of God. “He does not ask much of us – an occasional remembrance, a small act of worship, now to beg his grace, at times to offer him our distresses, at another time to render thanks for the favors he has given, and which he gives in the midst of your labors, to find consolation with him as often as you can. At table and in the midst of conversation, lift your heart at times towards him. The smallest remembrance will always please him. It is not needful at such times to cry out loud. He is nearer to us than we think.” Frank Laubach, the father of modern literacy movement who strove to put Brother Lawrence’s principles to practice throughout his lifetime, reported that his efforts were duly rewarded. “After months and years of practicing the presence of God, one feels that God is closer, his push from behind seems to be stronger and steadier, and the pull from front seems to grow stronger . . . God is so close then that he not only lives all around us, but also all through us.”
This then is the lesson. Rather than seeking confirmation of his presence in our emotion, we need to put ourselves in God’s presence. I need to remind myself that God is all around me and strive to conduct my life in a way appropriate to his presence. As David who said in Psa 16:8, “I have set the Lord always before me”, can we refer back to God whatever happens today, as a kind of offering? We will then be able to say like David, “because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.”
