Day Shift — The One Place You'll Never Find God

"Healing happens here, in this moment."

I’ve found a lot of help in recovery programs. Some people have problems with recovery programs because they tend to talk a lot about God, and some people have associations with God that are less than ideal. They’ve had bad experiences with parents, churches, or communities that weren’t really living the ideals of true religiosity or spirituality. But the truth is, we have to have something bigger than ourselves to solve our problems.

If I have a problem with food, drugs, alcohol, sex—there are over 130 12-step programs in the United States, so I can’t possibly name all the things we can hurt ourselves with or soothe ourselves with, as the case may be. But in order to find a way free from those addictions, those things that have a hold on us, that cause us to behave in ways we don’t want to behave or do things we don’t want to do, we must find a power greater than ourselves. The shorthand for that is God.

I remember a day in recovery work, hearing something I’d heard 100, 500, maybe 1,000 times before: We have this problem, we can’t manage our own lives, and probably no human power can relieve us of this problem of alcoholic thinking, of torturing ourselves in the mind. God could and would if God were sought. That day, I heard the word sought. I realized I didn’t have to find God—I was meant simply to seek God.

Then I realized: every major religion, every spiritual stream, speaks of God as being omnipresent—every place, every time. So where do I seek God? Where do I not seek God? I seek God everywhere. I seek God in this moment. I seek God in your eyes. I seek God within myself. I seek God everywhere.

But there’s one place where God is never found: in the speculating mind. The speculating mind rehashes what has already been experienced, and God is not something that happened—God is something that is. The one place I will never find God is in my thinking. The one place I can find God is in this present moment.

My job is to get out of my thinking and get here. Not to beat myself up for falling back into my thinking, but simply to come back to this moment, again and again and again, with the idea that there’s something here for me—something useful, something helpful. Healing happens here.

As I began to change and grow spiritually, I realized I had spent a great portion of my life in hell. Yesterday, I looked up hell, just to see what people had to say about it. My favorite definition of hell wasn’t about St. Augustine’s lakes of fire or Dante’s nine circles of hell. My favorite description was: hell is the place where God is not.

Hell does exist—in my thinking, in my conceptualizing mind that can only build an experience of life from what it has already experienced. We don’t thrive on the old and used up; we thrive on the new. We thrive on the new and ever-unfolding now.

So get here. It’s not a bad place to be.

Much love. Thanks for reading.

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Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and authored the book Embracing Bliss.