by Levi Ritchie

Created on: July 02, 2008   Last Updated: November 03, 2008

Look in front of you. Look beside you. Look behind you. Do you see God? Neither do I. Certainly, you might see his handiwork or his people, but you probably don't see God sitting on your couch watching TV or eating dinner at your table. That's kids' Sunday School stuff, of course. We know that we can't see God like that.

Are you prepared for another Sunday School lesson? God is everywhere. If you grew up going to a typical Church, you probably have heard this one over and over. Isn't it odd how these two simple, widely accepted facts appear to contradict each other?

I am, by no stretch of the imagination, the first person to point this out. So, before approaching this subject in more detail, I would like to introduce the term "Omnipresent" as a substitute for the word "everywhere" in the above example. What is an Omnipresent God?

To answer that question, you really need to open your mind to a new perception of reality. Christians and non-Christians alike tend to shove the concept of God, as well as every spiritual idea, into a physical, 3 dimensional, 5-human-senses pattern of thought. For example, you could ask a child how God can exist everywhere without being seen, and they might have the impression that God is magically looking at us from heaven. They might point upward while they say this, demonstrating, apparently, that heaven exists on a line in space extending outward from the child's current location on earth.

It seems ridiculously silly, until you begin to consider how very similar it is to the perceptions older Christians still have. If you are like me, you have, at some point in your life, thought yourself to be quite mature for progressing from the thought that God watches us from somewhere else in the Galaxy to the thought that he sees us from a different dimension, or a different world altogether. While it sounded more realistic, I later found it to be just as juvenile as the previous idea of a local-universe God. I was still picturing God as someone who saw me from a separate location.

This is where the word "Omnipresent" comes into play. Try not to imagine that God exists near you. Try not to imagine that God exists somewhere far away in our universe, or in any other universe. These things may be true, of course, but clear your head for a moment to avoid limiting God to something that you can comprehend on Earth. Suppose, now, that God exists beyond a physical, understandable world altogether. Suppose that God exists beyond existence itself. What

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