I measured God by goosebumps

I could tell you the exact metric I used to measure my relationship with Jesus, and it had nothing to do with Jesus. It was my heart rate. It was the tightness in my throat during the bridge of the song. It was whether the room went quiet at the right moment and whether my eyes stung when the lights dropped.

That was my thermometer. Feelings in, faith out. If I cried, God had shown up. If I felt flat, either He had left or I had sinned my way out of range. I never said that out loud, because it sounds insane written down. But I lived it for the better part of a decade.

Here is the trap: emotions are not fake. They are real, God-given, and often holy. The problem was never that I felt something. The problem was that I made the feeling the evidence. And when the feeling is the evidence, you will spend your whole life chasing conditions instead of chasing Christ — the right playlist, the right room, the right camp week in July.

Elijah found God after the wind and the earthquake and the fire had all gone by. A whisper. Nothing you could put on a highlight reel. Nothing that would trend. And that was the presence he had been begging for.

I am not against big moments. I have had them and I am grateful for them. But a big moment is a doorway, not a house. You cannot live in a doorway. At some point you have to walk in, put your stuff down, and stay.

Ask yourself the honest question I finally had to ask: if the music stopped tonight and never came back, would I still know how to be with God tomorrow morning? If the answer scares you, you are not far from Him. You are just close to the truth for the first time in a while.