Last night I felt the “chill.”

I gave my music to God five years ago and He has hidden the chill from me ever since. There have been moments in these last five years when I wondered if I would ever feel it again.

I remember at the age of 10 sitting Indian style in front of the speaker playing my carpet piano while Keith Greens “The Prodigal Son” enchanted. I remember at the age of 15 lying on my waterbed with my Walkman blaring U2s “Where The Streets Have No Name,” mesmerized by its beautiful simplicity. And I remember driving home from the hospital after the birth of my son listening to Coldplay’s brilliant “Clocks ” – all of these moments were accompanied by the “chill.”

It would surprise me, tickling my skull and shivering down my spine. If you have experienced it, then you know. It’s the perfect moment when your sound, soul, and spirit combine to create aural ecstasy. It’s a moment where God shows His face – and He is smiling. The world is beautiful, God is good and everything is in its right place. I feel it as a chill. This chill is not the only way I feel God, its just one of the ways he has revealed Himself to me through music… It’s also one of the reasons I fell in love with music.

I am a musician, a singer and a songwriter. As Brennan Manning says,” it’s the story of my life but not the whole story.” I have ached with the longing to create. I have dreamed of being able to – for a moment – create an atmosphere in which “the chill” can visit. I think it’s one of the reasons I was created.

The absence of the “chill” was agony. It was the death of a dream, the surrender of a “story.”

And in this surrender, I have learned the voice of God regardless of the chill. I have learned that He is in a song even when there is no chill. He is in a moment even when He is not felt. He is in my worship even when intimacy is intellectual, a discipline.

I am about the presence of God. I am about the experience. I want to feel Him with me, around me. And in these last years, I have learned that the presence of God is here even when I can’t feel Him. Though I have been taught this since I was a child, I now know it from experience. His love, mercy, grace, forgiveness, glory, honor, goodness, majesty – the “chill”… Every aspect of God is present and I have access to Him in all of these areas not because I can feel Him but because it’s who he is. I choose to believe this.

I think this may be what the renewing of a mind feels like.

That being said, it was wonderful to feel the chill again…

Jason Clark is a writer, speaker and lead communicator at A Family Story ministries. His mission is to encourage sons and daughters to grow sure in the love of an always-good heavenly Father. He and his wife, Karen, live in North Carolina with their three children.

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