Practicing Presence w/ Afrika Mills

Practicing Presence w/ Afrika Mills

Cara: Welcome to GC Podcast, a podcast to help you develop into the healthiest ministry leader you can be by sharing practical ministry experience. In this episode, we welcome Afrika Afeni Mills, who will be leading us through an exercise. It will help us practice and become more aware of the presence of God with us.

We invite you to co-create your own experiences of spiritual formation through personal and communal practices. We believe that through such personal and communal practices, we open ourselves and surrender to the work of the Holy Spirit in and through us. May the work of the Holy Spirit in our midst grow us up into the healthiest participants in the ministry of Christ that we can be, to the glory of the Father.

Afrika: Hello, I am Afrika Afeni Mills, and I serve as the Faith Avenue Champion at GC Steele Creek in Charlotte, North Carolina. I am so excited to talk with you about practicing being in the presence of God, and particularly, talking about a welcoming soul healing in God’s presence.

I have had the gift and opportunity to be a part of the School of Formation and Transforming Centers, Transforming Community. In those spaces, I have been learning a lot about what it means to relate to God in a secure way and, in a way, being reparented by God, as well.

All of us were raised by the folks who are our caregivers, and our caregivers do the best that they can. At the same time, all of us as human beings have fractures, and we have brokenness that sometimes causes a bit of challenge for us as we grow in our relationships with God. We can sometimes take some of those experiences and the brokenness that comes from some of those experiences and bring that into our relationship with God. We sometimes feel like he may be distant, not listening, or he is disconnected from what we are experiencing.

I want to talk about what we learn about God in the scriptures, what the scriptures tell us, particularly Psalm 23 says,

1 The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing. 2 He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, 3 he refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake. 4 Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. 5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. 6 Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

I love that passage. It is my favorite passage in all of Scripture because it reveals how present God is with us. All the references in that passage talk about God’s active engagement with us, God’s presence with us, God being with us, comforting us, and anointing us with abundant love and goodness.

When we think about being in the presence of God, it’s what I love to have anchoring my time with him. Also in Matthew 11: 28-30, Jesus says,

28 “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

That passage, also, is so encouraging because it is Jesus inviting us to be with him, just as he is Immanuel with us. That invitation shows how much he cares for us and that he notices where we are all burdened, where we have challenges, and when we are exhausted and need rest.

When I think about exhaustion, I think about that in our physical bodies, but also in our spirits. This invitation for Jesus to walk alongside us and to help us is such a warm and loving invitation, especially when he talks about being gentle and humble. We know that these things are true in Scripture, and we know intellectually, and even in our spirit, that we can be in God’s presence and that all these things are available to us.

Yet, we struggle because we are human beings who have had different experiences in our relationships with the people in our lives that make it hard for us to live into the reality of God’s presence. One of the things I wanted to talk about and share with you today is the practice of transforming or inner healing prayer.

I had the experience of participating in Odyssey in Christ’s “Experiencing the Trinity” retreat last in the fall of 2023. It was the first time I had heard about this spiritual practice. I had heard about several other ways of engaging with God, but this one resonated with me because it talked about and acknowledged that we do need such help from God when we want to go through transformation with him.

There are things in us that need to be healed. From the guide that we received as participants, it says, and I quote from the guide,

“Our growing love relationship with the Lord involves an invitation to participate with him in his ongoing ministry. One vital component of Jesus’ ministry has always been that of healing. He has come to heal the brokenhearted, to release and set free those who are in darkness, and to provide for those who grieve, blessing them with the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment in praise instead of a spirit of despair. [And that comes from Isaiah 63: 1-3.] The healing ministry of Christ involves the provision of restoration to wholeness at all levels of human concern. As with other aspects of his ministry, Jesus invites us to participate with him.” [p 35]

And then the guide goes on to quote from Richard Foster’s writing, Prayer, Finding the Heart’s True Home, and Richard Foster says,

“Healing prayer… is a clear recognition of the incarnational nature of our faith. God cares as much about the body as he does the soul, as much about the emotions as he does the spirit. The redemption that is in Jesus is total, involving every aspect of the person — body, soul, will, mind, emotions, spirit.”

Let us think about this exercise, this spiritual practice. I will go through the way I want to do the steps of the practice, and then I will talk through a bit of what my experience has been with that practice.

I am going to invite you to lean into your time with God, and to spend some time reflecting on each of the steps. I will pause between the steps so that you may do that in your own time with God.

We begin with an invocation, where we invoke the presence of God. That is really, on a basic level, asking God to be with you, even though we know he is always with us. We are inviting his active presence with us in this time that we are spending with him intentionally. So, I would like for you to pause for about a minute, and just spend some time inviting God to be with you.

[Pause.]

The next step in the exercise is that you would like to do — ideally, if you have someone who is like a spiritual director or companion or friend for you, would be able to invoke this blessing over you. But, if you are engaging in this by yourself, you can begin by asking the Holy Spirit to be with you and then wait in silence as you open your heart to the Lord.

I would like for you to do that now. I invite you to take about a minute to just sit in God’s presence and ask for God’s blessing over you during this time.

[Pause.]

The next step that you are going to engage with is conversation and preparation. So, you have already now invoked God’s presence. You have now either had a blessing asked over you, or you have asked for a blessing on yourself and have listened to what the Holy Spirit would say to you. In this third step for a conversation and preparation, you are beginning also with some time of silence, which I will invite you into again. This time is to sense God’s presence where you are moving into letting God know what it is that you are hoping for in prayer with him.

And if you’re not sensing God’s presence in the way that you might think — because sometimes, we expect that these times we spend with God to happen in a certain way and sometimes we are not sure if what it is that we are whether we have heard from God or not. But just be able to lean into the process and to prepare to encounter God.

You are acknowledging that you are anticipating God, experiencing tangibly God’s love and care for you, and you want to lean into the invitation to center your thoughts on Jesus. I invite you to spend some additional time in silence. We will take about another minute to just sit before God and to really be sensing God’s presence. And you can be praying verbally or silently to God. You are just going to continue to sit in his presence.

[Pause.]

Step four in the process is listening in prayer. This is my favorite part. Then, I will tell you a bit about what I experienced when I engaged in this practice. This is a time where you, either with your spiritual director or companion or on your own, where you go to a safe place in your mind, where you would enjoy meeting with God.

This can be a literal place or an imagined space with God. Do not worry if no place comes to mind, which is okay. Try to imagine a place where you would encounter God, acknowledge that God is your Lord, remember that God loves you dearly, and that he says in his word that he will never leave you.

You want to try to imagine a place like that. We want to spe