When the Presence Finds You First
There are moments in a believer’s life that feel like subtle nudges, quiet impressions, or fleeting hints that God might be drawing near, and then there are moments that are so unmistakably divine that they brand themselves into your spirit forever and reshape the entire trajectory of your faith. When I look back on my own story, the moment that changed me most did not arrive in the form of thunder or lightning or voices from heaven, nor did it come wrapped in mystery or accompanied by dramatic supernatural signs that demanded interpretation. It came as something far gentler and far more overwhelming, a pure and peaceful presence that settled on me at a time when I was not seeking perfection, performance, or spiritual achievement but was simply longing, in the quietest and most honest way, to feel God for myself. I did not come to that moment as a polished believer, and I certainly did not walk in carrying a resume of spiritual victories. I came fragile, uncertain, stretched thin, and with the kind of tired faith that so many Christians quietly carry but rarely admit out loud. The surprising beauty of what happened is not merely that God met me there, but that He met me before I even knew how to reach back toward Him. That single encounter became the foundation upon which everything else in my life eventually grew, and it taught me something I am convinced every believer must understand if they desire to feel the presence of God like never before: God’s presence is not something we earn, achieve, or chase; it is something we learn to respond to once we finally realize His presence has been reaching for us all along.
I want to take you into that moment gently and slowly, because it was not the kind of encounter you rush through or try to package into neat bullet points or catchy spiritual slogans. I had reached a point where I felt spiritually dry despite my best attempts at devotion, and I could not articulate why. I prayed, but my prayers felt like they were hitting the drywall in front of me. I read Scripture, but the words did not sink in with the depth I longed for. I tried to worship, but my heart felt numb as if wrapped in layers of emotional insulation that I could not peel back. I kept wondering what was wrong with me and why my faith seemed to lack the fire and nearness that others spoke about. I started asking myself the hard questions that believers usually keep buried under the surface because they are afraid their honesty might sound like doubt. Why do I feel distant from God? Why do I feel like everyone else hears Him more clearly than I do? Why does His presence feel like something I have to fight for instead of something I can rest in? Those questions began to swirl through my mind in ways that were both humbling and exhausting, and yet they prepared the soil of my heart for the one truth that I believe is the #1 key to deepening your relationship with God, starting today: God’s presence is most powerful in the lives of those who stop striving for it and start surrendering to it.
The night everything changed was nothing exceptional in its setup. There was no revival service happening. No conference. No emotional music in the background. No preacher calling people to the altar. I was alone in a quiet room with nothing but silence around me and a restlessness inside me that I could no longer ignore. It was one of those nights when I felt like something in my spirit was unsettled, but instead of drowning it out with distractions or telling myself to power through it, I decided to let myself feel it. I sat on the floor, not because it was holy but because it was honest. It was the posture of someone who was tired of appearing strong and finally willing to sit in the truth of their weakness. I didn’t have fancy words or polished prayers to offer. What came out was simple and vulnerable and painfully true: God, I don’t want to play church. I don’t want to pretend. I don’t want to act like everything is fine. I just want You. If You’re there, meet me. If You’re real, let me feel You. If You’re near, then show me I’m not alone. It wasn’t eloquent. It wasn’t poetic. But it was sincere, and sincerity is the doorway through which the presence of God loves to enter.
What happened next is something that even now I struggle to describe, not because it was confusing but because it was so pure that words feel inadequate compared to its reality. The air in the room didn’t shift dramatically, yet something invisible became undeniably tangible. It was as if the entire atmosphere softened around me, like stepping into a sacred stillness that was both gentle and breathtaking at the same time. It wasn’t an emotion, although emotion followed. It wasn’t a thought, although my mind was instantly quieted. It wasn’t imagination, because imagination bends to the will, and this presence overruled the will with peace. It felt as if something holy wrapped around me, not like a blanket but like a truth I had known all my life yet never fully recognized until that moment. I felt seen without being judged. Loved without being evaluated. Held without being asked to prove anything. I felt God’s presence the way you feel sunlight—not because you are thinking about the sun but because the warmth is undeniable and the light is unmistakable. It was the first time I realized I had been looking for God through spiritual performance while He had been waiting for me through spiritual honesty.
That encounter taught me that the presence of God does not rush you, pressure you, or force itself upon you. It does not require perfection, expertise, or religious accomplishment. It arrives in the places where you stop trying to manufacture a holy moment and simply allow God to be God. The #1 way to deepen your relationship with Him is not by doing more, achieving more, praying louder, worshiping harder, or pretending to be stronger than you feel. The #1 way is surrender. Real surrender. The kind that happens when you finally stop trying to impress God and begin allowing Him to impress Himself upon you. Surrender is not weakness. It is not passivity. It is not giving up on faith. Surrender is the quiet courage to trust that God’s presence responds to authenticity far more than it responds to effort. It is the posture of a heart that no longer tries to earn what has already been offered freely. When you surrender, you stop striving to climb toward God and start realizing that God has already descended toward you. You stop treating His presence like a reward for performance and start embracing it as a gift for belonging. When you surrender, you stop reaching for God with clenched fists and start opening your hands so He can place His presence there without resistance.
Many believers never feel God deeply because they never truly surrender. They speak the language of surrender but live the rhythm of striving. They carry Bibles but also carry burdens they refuse to release. They lift worship songs while still clinging to control. They pray for God to move but stand guard over the areas of their lives they refuse to let Him touch. They want His presence but fear the vulnerability required to receive it. And so they live spiritually exhausted, spiritually frustrated, spiritually distant, and spiritually numb. They keep trying harder, thinking more effort will unlock what feels locked, but the harder they try, the more distant God seems. Not because He is withholding Himself, but because striving blinds the soul while surrender opens the eyes. Striving is rooted in the fear that God is reluctant. Surrender is rooted in the trust that God is near. When I encountered God that night, I realized something life-changing: His presence had always been available, but I had made myself unavailable by trying to force spiritual closeness rather than allowing spiritual nearness. That single shift transformed everything.
To experience God like never before, you must understand that His presence often comes disguised in stillness and approaches your life quietly, waiting for a moment when your guard drops and your soul becomes honest enough to receive Him. You can chase emotional highs, but emotional highs evaporate. You can chase spiritual perfection, but spiritual perfection collapses under the pressure of expectation. You can chase answers, formulas, and religious structures, but none of those opens the door to the presence of God. The presence of God opens itself to hearts that are willing to be truthful, to stand uncovered before Him, to admit that they need Him more than they need understanding or control. The presence of God shows up where humility replaces pressure, where sincerity replaces performance, and where vulnerability replaces religious image. When you stop trying to manage your spiritual life and instead begin yielding it, God steps into the space you create with a gentleness that holds the power to transform your entire identity.
I want you to understand something that took me far too long to learn. Feeling God’s presence is not a sign of spiritual maturity; it is the fruit of spiritual honesty. The most mature believers are not the ones who know the most Scripture or pray the longest prayers or showcase the strongest spiritual gifts. The most mature believers are those who have learned to become childlike in God’s presence. Children do not complicate the love they receive. They do not overthink affection. They do not try to earn parental attention. They simply respond to it. Jesus did not say become more intelligent, more insightful, or more theologically polished; He said become like little children. Why? Because children know how to receive without suspicion. They know how to trust without calculation. They know how to surrender without hesitation. The presence of God rests most deeply upon those who approach Him not with resistance or self-consciousness but with quiet, fearless openness. That is the heart posture that transforms your entire walk with God.
Your relationship with God deepens when you learn how to be still—not passive stillness, but trusting stillness. Stillness is not inactivity. It is receptivity. It is the spiritual courage to stop filling the silence with your own voice long enough for God to reveal His. It is the willingness to sit in moments of discomfort until your spirit settles. It is the ability to allow God to hold you without asking Him to hurry. It is the kind of stillness where burdens begin to loosen, where anxieties begin to soften, and where the heart begins to open like a locked door finally releasing its tension. That night, when I felt His presence, it was not because I conquered distraction; it was because I released self-protection. The walls I had built to appear strong quietly fell, and in their place rose a gentle awareness that God was not distant but deeply near. I had been trying to meet God on the battlefield of performance, but He had been waiting for me on the ground of surrender.
When the presence of God finally touched me that night, I discovered a truth that would stay with me for the rest of my life: once your heart learns the language of surrender, you begin to perceive God everywhere. You begin to sense Him in quiet moments you once dismissed as ordinary, in conversations that felt too coincidental to ignore, in the small turns of life that gently redirect your path, and in the sudden clarity that descends on you when you need it most. God becomes less of an idea to understand and more of a reality to experience. Faith becomes less about reaching upward and more about allowing Him to draw near. You stop feeling like you have to chase Him because you begin to realize He has been chasing you. You stop believing that spiritual closeness requires intensity and start discovering that it requires sensitivity. You stop feeling like God hides Himself and start seeing that you simply had too much noise in your soul to notice Him. That encounter taught me not only how to sense His presence in dramatic moments but how to perceive Him in the everyday fabric of my life, and once you learn to recognize the subtle ways God draws near, your entire world becomes a living sanctuary.
So many believers struggle to experience God because they imagine His presence as something spectacular, something reserved for mountaintop moments, something dramatic or overwhelming or emotionally explosive, when in reality His presence often comes like a whisper rather than a whirlwind. Elijah discovered this when he stood on the mountain waiting for God, expecting Him in the wind, the earthquake, and the fire, only to find Him instead in the still small voice that followed. That moment in Scripture reveals something profound about God’s nature and human expectation: God is fully capable of overwhelming displays of power, yet He chooses to meet His children most often in ways that require attentiveness more than adrenaline. The presence of God is not always loud, but it is always real. Not always dramatic, but always transformative. Not always emotional, but always intimate. If you expect God only in the spectacular, you will overlook Him in the subtle. If you wait for Him only in the extraordinary, you will miss Him in the everyday. Learning to feel the presence of God begins with learning to value His whisper as much as His thunder.
As my own journey with God continued beyond that night, I realized how easily we complicate what was never meant to be complicated. God’s presence is not something we ascend into by climbing spiritual ladders; it is something we descend into by laying down spiritual striving. It is the reward of humility, not the trophy of performance. It is the response to authenticity, not the prize for religious discipline. Yet so many believers treat God like a distant monarch whose throne can only be approached through flawless obedience, polished behavior, and perfectly curated spiritual posture. They assume God draws near only to those who have mastered devotion, memorized enough Scripture, or proven their worth through spiritual intensity. But that is not the God revealed in Scripture or the God I encountered. The God who met me did not come because I was strong but because I was honest. Not because I was impressive but because I was open. Not because I earned Him but because I needed Him. The presence of God is attracted to need far more than it is attracted to achievement, and the sooner you embrace that truth, the sooner your life becomes a place where God’s presence feels at home.
You deepen your relationship with God when you learn how to let go of the illusion that you must be spiritually polished to draw near to Him. He already knows your weaknesses. He already knows your questions. He already knows your inconsistencies, your doubts, your fears, your temptations, and your wandering thoughts. You cannot shock a God who sees everything. You cannot disappoint a God who knew your frailty before you ever knew His name. God does not draw near despite your humanity; He draws near because He is faithful through your humanity. When you stop performing for God and begin presenting yourself honestly before Him, His presence begins to wash over the places where your heart once felt guarded. The walls built out of fear, shame, insecurity, and exhaustion begin to crumble. The presence you once treated as something rare becomes something familiar. You begin to associate God with nearness instead of distance, with comfort instead of pressure, with peace instead of striving. That is the miracle of surrender: it transforms your entire perception of God.
One of the most remarkable changes in my life after that encounter was how Scripture began to speak differently. The same passages I had read for years suddenly opened in new ways. Verses I had skimmed without emotion began carrying personal weight. Promises I had mentally understood became spiritually alive. It was not because I had suddenly grown more intelligent or developed some advanced theological insight; it was because the presence of God illuminates what the mind alone cannot access. When God draws near, Scripture changes tone. It reads like a conversation instead of an obligation. It feels like nourishment instead of information. The Word of God becomes a living experience rather than a distant record. This is the power of encountering His presence: it does not simply make you feel something; it equips you to perceive Him everywhere, even in texts you thought you had mastered. When your spirit wakes up, the Bible stops being a book you study and becomes a voice you recognize.
Another transformation took root in my prayer life. Before that encounter, I prayed with the subconscious assumption that God was somewhere far away, listening from a distance, evaluating my words, weighing my sincerity, and deciding whether or not to respond based on how I performed. After that night, prayer became the natural continuation of an ongoing conversation. I stopped praying toward a distant God and started praying with a nearby Father. I stopped trying to convince God to hear me and began realizing He was already leaning in. I stopped scripting my words and began speaking from the rawest places of my soul. The quality of my prayers changed, not because I prayed longer but because I prayed more honestly. When you feel God’s nearness, prayer stops feeling like a task and begins to feel like a relationship. You stop approaching prayer with pressure and start approaching it with peace. You stop approaching it with formality and start approaching it with familiarity. You begin to understand that prayer was never meant to be a performance; it was always meant to be a place where your heart meets His without pretense.
One of the greatest signs that you are beginning to walk in the presence of God is that your fears lose their authority. Fear cannot coexist with perfect love, and the presence of God is perfect love in its purest form. When God draws near, fear loses its oxygen. Anxiety loses its volume. Worry loses its grip. Doubt loses its sharpness. You begin to sense a steadiness in your spirit that you cannot attribute to your own strength. A supernatural calm begins to anchor you in situations that once would have overwhelmed you. You begin making decisions from peace instead of panic, from wisdom instead of insecurity, from clarity instead of confusion. This is not because life becomes easier, but because presence becomes stronger. When the presence of God settles on your life, you stop being tossed by every storm and start being shaped by every moment. You become grounded, not in your own certainty, but in His faithfulness.
One of the most overlooked beauties of God’s presence is that it restores the parts of you that people damaged. God does not simply touch the spiritual parts of your life; He touches the emotional, mental, relational, and internal places you thought were beyond healing. When the presence of God draws near, shame begins to dissolve. When He draws near, the wounds caused by others begin to soften. When He draws near, the lies you believed about yourself lose their sting. The presence of God confronts the false identities you picked up along the way and begins replacing them with truth. You start to feel more whole, not because you worked harder at healing, but because the presence of God began stitching together what pain had torn apart. Many believers try to heal through spiritual effort, but healing is not the fruit of striving; it is the fruit of nearness. God heals by being close.
One of the most powerful insights God taught me after my encounter was that His presence does not increase through emotional intensity but through relational openness. People assume that the deeper they want to go with God, the more emotional they must become. But emotion is not depth; surrender is depth. Emotion is temporary; surrender is transformative. When I finally understood that, I stopped trying to manufacture intense encounters and started inviting God into simple, honest moments. And in those simple moments, His presence grew stronger than anything I had ever experienced in emotionally charged environments. His presence is not waiting for a dramatic altar call; it is waiting for your willingness to let Him be present in your ordinary humanity.
If you want to feel God’s presence like never before, you need to understand that the doorway is not effort but access—access created through honesty. God does not hide from those who seek Him; He hides from those who mask themselves. He reveals Himself to those who are real. When you come to Him sincerely, without pretense, without performance, without an agenda, His presence rests on you. When you open every locked room in your heart and stop keeping God outside the uncomfortable places, His nearness becomes unmistakable. When you stop bringing Him only the polished parts of your life and start bringing Him the broken parts, His presence fills your life in a way that nothing else can replicate. The presence of God is not something fragile that must be protected; it is something powerful that must be welcomed.
This is why the #1 way to deepen your relationship with God starting today is surrender—not partial surrender, conditional surrender, or temporary surrender, but full surrender. Surrender your fears. Surrender your timeline. Surrender your disappointments. Surrender your questions. Surrender your old identities. Surrender your need to understand. Surrender your pride. Surrender your attempts to qualify yourself. Surrender the parts of you that cling to control. God cannot transform what you refuse to release, and He cannot fill what you insist on holding. Surrender is not losing; it is making room. When you surrender, God steps into your life not gradually but abundantly.
And here is the miracle: once you experience God’s presence through surrender, you will begin to recognize how He has been moving in your life all along. You will look back and realize that moments you thought were coincidences were actually divine appointments. You will realize that seasons you labeled hopeless were seasons where He was protecting you. You will realize that prayers you thought were ignored were actually being answered in ways you could not yet see. You will recognize that relationships that ended were God removing obstacles to bring you closer to Him. You will see that opportunities denied were redirections toward something greater. You will understand that the peace you longed for was already being woven through your story, preparing you for the moment your spirit finally opened enough to feel Him deeply.
You do not need to chase the presence of God. You need to welcome it. God is already closer than your breath, nearer than your thoughts, and more present than your emotions. The presence you long for is already leaning toward you. What you feel as spiritual hunger is actually God drawing you. What you feel as restlessness is actually God inviting you. What you feel as longing is actually God calling you. The moment you stop striving and start surrendering, the presence of God floods your life in ways that feel natural, familiar, and breathtakingly real.
Once His presence becomes a lived reality, your identity begins to stabilize. You no longer define yourself by your past or your weaknesses. You no longer compare your walk with God to someone else’s journey. You no longer measure your worth by your accomplishments or failures. You stop living from insecurity because you start living from intimacy. Your identity becomes grounded in the presence that meets you daily, carrying you through storms and guiding you into seasons you once feared. When God’s presence becomes your home, you stop searching for belonging in places that cannot hold your soul.
As you continue surrendering day by day, you will notice that spiritual growth becomes less of a climb and more of a flow. You find yourself drawn to prayer without forcing it. You find yourself wanting Scripture without guilt driving you. You find yourself worshiping not to impress God but because your spirit naturally lifts toward Him. You find that choices become clearer, temptations weaken, and wisdom comes more easily, not because you are becoming stronger but because presence is becoming deeper. Everything in your spiritual life flows out of the presence of God, and when that presence becomes a daily reality, growth happens organically.
This is the legacy of encountering God: you become a person marked by His nearness. People sense peace in you they cannot explain. People notice compassion in you they did not expect. People see strength in you that does not come from human willpower. People feel encouraged simply by being around you. When God’s presence saturates your life, you become a living sanctuary, a walking reminder of His goodness, a vessel that carries His love into every environment you touch. You don’t have to force influence; presence creates influence. You don’t have to chase impact; presence becomes impact. The more deeply you surrender, the more powerfully He works through you.
If you want God’s presence like never before, if you want to deepen your relationship with Him starting today, if you want to feel Him in a way that transforms your life from the inside out, then let this be the moment you stop striving and start surrendering. You do not need to fix yourself. You do not need to become more spiritual. You do not need to pray more impressively. You simply need to open your heart honestly, sit before God authentically, and receive Him willingly. The presence you long for has been longing for you. The God you desire has been drawing you. And the relationship you want already has an open door waiting for you to walk through.
Your friend,
Douglas Vandergraph
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