To experience Him should be to know beauty. To hear from Him should be your soul’s food. To obey Him should be a sustaining joy. ~ Faith Eury Cho
At one thirty in the morning, when I was forty weeks and three days pregnant, Michael and I rushed to the hospital, because I was convinced the time had come to have a baby after some intense labor pains at home. But after we waited in triage, the sweetest night nurse checked me and promptly sent me home with the disappointing news that I was only one centimeter dilated. Little did I know that just eight hours later, at my previously scheduled appointment, my doctor would tell me that I had dilated enough in that short time to have the baby. Talk about a whirlwind.
Although my body had been warming up for the grand finale for months and we mentally knew our son was coming, nothing could have prepared us for what was next. Life would never be the same. Everyone told us that the newborn days would feel like walking around in a fog — dazed, confused, and exhausted. After all, we were entering into a new normal that we had no prior context for. You would think that after Hunter started sleeping through the night, my milk supply regulated from engorged to normal, and we got our daily routine somewhat ironed out, the world would be right again. Wrong. While our circumstances settled, my brain did not.
Research says that a woman’s brain changes after having a baby, that her gray-matter levels lower, on top of all the other hormonal shifts going on inside her body.1 To give you a quick science lesson: Gray matter is a valuable part of the central nervous system and plays a critical role in processing information and supporting things such as memory, emotions, and decision-making.2
To all the moms reading this: You’re not crazy. There’s scientific proof that how you’re feeling — flustered, scattered, and absent-minded — is real and is because of the chemical changes your body is undergoing. But I wouldn’t say this feeling of overwhelm and disconnect is common only to mothers. It’s also something nurses, executives, ministry leaders, students, empty nesters, home-steaders, and others experience.
- Working, raising children, studying, illness, loss, and the stress of daily living can lead to feelings of overwhelm and subsequent disengagement — so much so that it becomes hard to focus on what matters most, to show up fully present in our relationship with Jesus.
What about you? Do you ever feel like you’re not fully present in your life and relationship with God? Life — with all its responsibilities, to-dos, circumstances, surprises, and distractions — is happening so fast that it feels nearly impossible to keep up. However hard the challenge, however overwhelming life is, your core desire is to live unhindered by life’s burdens and demands. You want to be a present wife, mother, student, leader, teacher, associate, worker (insert your role here), but you’re constantly pulled in so many different directions. That leads us to a pivotal crossroads and a pivotal question: Is “present” really possible?
What would happen if we stopped waiting around for the perfect, serene circumstances and an empty calendar to prioritize the presence of God and, instead, met Him right where we were?
Maybe what we really need to do is relearn what it means to dwell with Him and prioritize His presence. And when we do that, we will be better equipped to steward whatever life has to throw at us.
God Is at Home with You
If you go to church regularly, spend time in the Bible, or are involved in a small group, the idea of God’s presence is not new to you. When we lose a loved one, people pray that God’s presence would be with us. When we walk through a fiery trial or feel swallowed up by the depths of depression, they say, “God is with you.” We sing songs about it in church, we whisper it in our prayers, and we say it to encourage others. My point is, we all know that God is with us, ever present and always near. But are we actually living like God is near to us and we are near to Him? Have we lost the meaning in the words “God is with us”?
In Bible times there were no townhouses, apartments, or condos. The places people lived were called “dwelling places,” a fancy term for tents or mud houses. But God’s presence surpassed physical walls. His plan was to dwell with His people. To stay with, remain with, and live with, no matter where they lived and no matter what their dwelling places looked like. God’s plan all along was to provide a refuge, shelter, and habitation for His people that would weather the storms of life and give them the rest they were wandering around longing for. That dwelling place was Himself. There was never a plan B.
In the Old Testament Moses witnessed the presence of God through a burning bush, and there are countless other stories of God’s presence manifested through miraculous signs and wonders. Eventually God set up camp and dwelled with His people primarily through the tabernacle, a place where only priests could go on behalf of the people. But in the New Testament God sent Jesus and His Spirit, who became a permanent home not bound by four walls or limited only to priests but completely accessible and available to anyone. The incredible news is that you and I live in the finished work of Jesus on the cross. We don’t have to ask a priest to go into the sacred, roped-off presence of God for us — we can do that in our homes, in our cars, at our desks, and while we wash our dirty dishes.
- The Spirit is alive and well and available in every moment.
But can we get brutally honest for a second? How many of us have invited Jesus into our homes but are hardly ever there to spend time with Him? How many of us have allowed our house to become cluttered with distractions and forgotten that the King of kings lives not just with us but in us? How many of us give Jesus a brief, cursory glance during our days and never really stop to be present with Him?
When Hunter turned one month old, I realized that I hadn’t opened my Bible and spent time in the Word since he was born. Thirty days I left my Bible untouched. The deceiver whispered shame over my soul, craftily convincing me that, because I had been away for so long, God would meet me with condemnation. The easier thing to do would have been to listen to the snake. To stay away, leave my Bible on the shelf, and keep God at arm’s length. But the reality is that the farther we stray from God, the longer we stay away, and the more we give in to distraction, the harder it is to live all in for God.
But now’s the time to step on the snake. Friend, if you have been giving everything and everyone else your time and attention, God will always welcome you back into His presence with loving arms when you turn back toward Him.
Romans 8 gives it to us straight:
Nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow — not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below — indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord. — Romans 8:38–39 NLT
Nothing. Nothing can separate us from the love of Jesus. God has never left you, and He never will. His presence is always present. Just as the father did with his prodigal son, He welcomes us home time and time again (Luke 15:11–32).
I wonder whether it’s easy to allow our relationship with God to flounder because we haven’t completely grasped the reality that He is the most devoted to and in love with us. That is our starting place.
When Christ is your home, you are always loved, always treasured, and always prioritized.
When you put Him first and when you regularly come into awareness of His presence in your life, you will see the weights, burdens, and overwhelm of life begin to lose their power over you. You will see that rhythmically prioritizing the presence of God gives you the tools to handle the stress and fullness of life, while putting distractions in their proper place.
1. Sonia Fernandez, “New Study Reveals Changes in the Brain Throughout Pregnancy,” University of California, September 19, 2024, https://www.universityofcalifornia .edu/news/new-study-reveals-changes-brain-throughout -pregnancy.
2. “Grey Matter,” Cleveland Clinic, last reviewed on March 19, 2023, https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health /body/24831-grey-matter.
Excerpted with permission from Overbooked and Overwhelmed by Tara Sun, copyright Tara Sun Snyder.
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Your Turn
Even if you’re overbooked and overwhelmed in this season, are you spending time with the Lord? Feeling disengaged is normal during intense times, but we all long to live unhindered by life’s burdens and demands. Keep connected to Jesus! Practice being in His presence and let Him lift your burdens. ~ Devotionals Daily