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For much of my spiritual life I have struggled to find the "personal God". I would concentrate incessantly on visualizing this presence of some sort in my mind, thinking that the Lord was discovered only when the mind gave uncompromised focus on His being.

While I was a student at Liberty University I gave blood each season when the blood mobile came to campus. One evening while waiting for my blood to be drawn, I was approached by a Indian man named Haniel. He was literally surrounded by the presence of the Holy Spirit. Every word he offered was saturated with the fragrance of God; a single thought wasn't uttered that didn't pertain to the spiritual realm. He prophesied many things over me that day, but in the midst of my great turmoil and quest to find intimacy with God, Haniel told me to stop trying so hard. I was eternally grateful to this man for speaking deeply into my life by affirming my need to break focus and simply accept the living God as my Savior and personal Lord.

I can't say that was the solution in itself, but that was one moment that has brought about redemption in my walk. I still struggle to find a pure intimacy in which I feel I'm completely experiencing the presence of God, but I can now remind myself to be free in the Spirit and run from all the painful concentration that leads only to piousness and frustration. In trying to find God so much in my own head I forgot the entire mystery of Him--Christ lives in US. Looking around at the body of believers is where I find my Lord. He teaches us more about Himself through His creation than we sometimes care to look for.

God is personal but He is also relational. Just as Haniel was used to usher in a truth for the Lord, so is each person useful that God has set aside for His purpose. In communion with each other God lives, speaks, and encounters us intimately. The personal God discovered through interpersonal relations.