I was speaking to a younger friend a couple of days ago over the phone. We were talking about something she had been battling with for a while and honestly, I felt like we were back to square 1, but hey, she didn’t call me to remind her of that, but to encourage her even further, so while on the phone, I lay down asking God where we had missed it, and why we’re still back here, feeling like there hasn’t been any progress.

God gave me this very random question to ask her and funny thing, it caught her by surprise the same way I was caught by surprise. After talking around it, she finally gave me an answer and the answer revealed more to me than any other answer she had ever given me.

My friend is a christian, she loves the Lord and shes willing to to do right by Him because she wants to respond back to His encompassing love. But my friend doesn’t believe He is as real and as tangible to her as me that was speaking to her. She quickly delved into the come-back of “well I can actually see you and talk to you and get a reply, but I can’t seem to do same with God” and obviously, this was revelation to me that she had settled in that truth, that however close she gets to God, she would be unable to dialogue with Him as we sat talking to each other.

It took us to a fresh start of realising how real God is and recognising that He is just as present as the next person beside us.

After our conversation, while still reminiscing on how big an issue we failed to address early on, I felt the Holy Spirit tell me that it’s the same issue with a large part of the church. ‘I’m real to them only in sermons and bible studies, but people don’t really see me as they see their best friend, or the person who’s sitting right next to them.’

The reality of God to us unlocks a huge part of our relational journey with Him, you might be like my friend who believes that if you could see and touch Him like you see and touch me then it might be more real to you, but that’s exactly where our faith comes in, that we don’t have to see to believe and we don’t need physical evidence to believe. God wants to be as real to us as real can be.

Just this morning, I lay in bed thinking about something, it wasn’t even that big of a deal and while thinking on it, I heard the Holy Spirit say ‘Talk to me about it naw’, and it was like a reminder again that it is not only when we kneel in prayer or hold hands in communal services that we can speak to God, right in the middle of anything and anywhere, God wants us to commune with Him.

There is nothing like ‘Lets face reality’ when speaking in relation to God, because God Himself is a reality. Here is praying that our eyes are daily open to His realness and that we don’t just believe it because people say it, but we ourselves are able to testify of a God that is as real to us as the person right next to us.