By Sarah D. Park

I have missed the ways I used to meet God in community.

I remember what it used to feel like to have multiple hands reach out and touch my shoulders, my back, my head in solidarity as we knocked on the door of heaven in prayer. 

I remember what it felt like to feel the Spirit stir within me like an insistent nudge, laced by the smallest twinge of fear that only confirmed I had to get up and go get prayer.

I remember the thrill of discussing stories from the Bible with curiosity, wonder, and concordances.

Old, simple worship songs still get me in the gut and out come my tears of feeling known and seen by God.

I know these are avenues that are still available to me. I might even create spaces to practice these disciplines again.

But the way I participate in the Body is a bit different now and I find myself searching for the divine in internal ways. In slivers of time before the day’s to-do list begins. In quiet minutes where I can just be. In moments where I catch myself in the present and notice how fat and delicious my baby’s feet still are. 

Someone once told me that there is a place of rest between breaths. When you inhale until you get to the top of your breath right before you let your lungs loose, there is a place of rest. And when you exhale until the point where your breath has fully emptied out, there is a place of rest. In and out. In and out. A cycle of rest built into our very bodies. Someone once told me that these moments of rest are always there for us should we need them, should we notice them. 

This body that God so wonderfully and fearfully made has been teaching me. Motherhood in its breaking of the body and spirit has been teaching me. My yearning for rest has been teaching me. I miss the God I used to know, but I’m discovering that the more I identify with the humanness of Jesus, the more of the divine I encounter.

Sarah D. Park is a freelance writer whose work focuses on the cultivation of cross-racial dialogue with a Christian faith orientation. She is also a story producer for Inheritance Magazine and manages communications for several organizations. She currently calls the Bay Area her home but is an Angeleno through and through.