Your prayer must be turned inwards, not towards a God of Heaven nor towards a God far off, but towards God who is closer to you than you are aware.
– Anthony Bloom

We live in an introspective society—at least in the sense that we are self-oriented, or even narcissistic. Our gaze is often turned upon ourselves. And some of us, myself included, have always been more inclined towards introspection. I have kept journals for as long as I can remember, because somehow experiences do not feel complete until I have contemplated them. My sense of self is not complete until I have reflected on whatever is going on within me.

But is there a difference between taking the inward journey alone, and taking it with God? When it comes to seeing truths about ourselves, is there a difference between doing it on our own, or with God?

I’ve been reading through Richard Foster’s book Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home. It is excellent. In the chapter on the prayer of examen, Foster describes what it means to, “without apology and without defense . . . see what is truly in us.” This is a joint search, he emphasizes. This is not a journey we go on alone. God comes along with us. And that makes all the difference. 

Too often, as Madame Guyon puts it, we depend “on the diligence of our own scrutiny rather than on God for the discovery and knowledge of our sin.” When we look inwards alone, we tend to either excuse ourselves too much, or beat ourselves up too much. We fail to see the true seriousness of our sin and excuse ourselves too readily. Or we are too hard on ourselves; we berate and condemn ourselves mercilessly in our minds, listening to negative inner voices, being drawn into downward spirals of toxic rumination and criticism. 

But when we take the inward journey with God, he shows us what we need to see to the degree for which we are prepared to see it. He reveals to us the true nature of our sin and in his presence we see it for what it is. But right with that is a sense of protection and comfort. There may be pain, but there is always a sense in which it is for our good. There is always a sense of his loving presence alongside us.

When we turn inward without God, what we often are effectively doing is trying to find within ourselves, as Foster puts it, “some special inner strength or an inner savior who will deliver us.” We are wanting to know ourselves more so that we can help ourselves more to get to whatever we think we need to get to more—and even if that goal is godly, we inevitably become more and more of the center of it all. But Foster describes true examen this way: “it is not a journey into ourselves that we are undertaking but a journey through ourselves so that we can emerge from the deepest level of the self into God.”

That’s the difference: we are journeying through ourselves so that we can emerge from that place to find God. And find him we will. Guyon writes about something she calls “the law of central tendency”: “As you continue holding your soul deep in your inward parts, you will discover that God has a magnetic attracting quality! Your God is like a magnet! The Lord naturally draws you more and more toward Himself.”

When we take the inward journey with God, he becomes more and more the center of it all. We begin to see him working more and more in the events of our day. We become more attune to how he is moving through others around us. We become more mindful of our response to him. We begin to see our own selves with more context, truth, and purpose. We find that even the revelation of our most shameful, gripping sins lead us to a place of deep joy as we see the beauty of God’s love for us.

In the end, we travel into ourselves to find something beyond ourselves. Frank Laubach, who once decided to see how many minutes a day he could be conscious of God’s presence and chronicled his experience in diaries and journals, wrote: “I feel simply carried along each hour, doing my part in a plan which is far beyond myself . . . My part is to live this hour in continuous inner conversation with God and in perfect responsiveness to His will. This seems to be all I need to think about.”