26th January 2026

Billy Graham, in his December 31 devotional in his book Unto the Hills said: ‘…we do not worship an absentee God.’ I fully agree with this statement. He said that the Christian would know that, or be assured of that fact, by the Bible he read. I know at times it may seem like God has gone AWOL when we manage to dig ourselves deeper into the mess of our own creation, or when nature itself is just doing its thing in a very extreme way, yet he is present in every moment of this existence. As we observe the world around us, we also have as a testimony, the fact that God in the past was fully able to work with the world in its madness and will also be able to work with the mess that the world has created now. As his word stands firm, so do his promises.

God is not a prisoner of time as we are; and I might even guess that he is everywhere at every tick of the clock of time, all the time. I have every allotted minute of time that God has given to me and in this time frame God is present with me always; he has always been and always will be. He may hold my hand, but he never holds me back.

We might have often thought and asked God why he did not stop us from doing wrong, or stopped them, or whatever it was that came upon us, to cause us harm. And though it seems God is absent at these times, he is not; he is allowing us to make the right or wrong choices, though we often do not choose right. We may be stuck with the result of our choices, God is not; and what I mean by this is, he has the power needed to correct our mistakes in his way and in his timing. If he did everything for us, we would never learn to make the right choices.

Learning can be painful, and also quite exciting. How glorious it is when we finally succeed and move forward in this learning process. Like a waltz, we move two steps forward and two steps back but always flowing with the music and taking the lead of our partner, we move to the culmination of the dance; our wholeness in Christ, our process of becoming who he has always meant us to be; his glorious child.

God told Moses in Exodus 3:12: “I will be with you.” And God was. God promised to be with Issac, and he was (Genesis 26:2-4); he promised to be with Jacob and he was (Genesis 31:3). 

That in itself did not stop them from getting into messes, but when they did, they had God right there to help them; they just had to call on his name. 

I was pulled to Hebrews 10:14 this morning in my reading: ‘For by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.’ Do you feel perfect? God said we have been made so, but he goes on to say that we are still in the process. God is not done yet, but it will be so. God is always with us, always working on making us perfect and holy, so, I guess the question is: how willing are we to allow this process to proceed? How long it takes really depends on us. It is not God who is absent.

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