I’ve been sitting with a question lately, and I don’t think I’ve fully answered it yet, which is probably why I’m writing about it instead of just thinking about it.

The question is this: why does closeness with God feel so available some mornings, and so far away on others, when nothing on the surface has changed? Same prayer time. Same gratitude list. Same chair.

Not long ago I wrote about the fear of the Lord — how the fears I’d been managing my whole life were mostly misplaced, sized way past what they deserved, and how seeing God’s actual scale made them look almost silly by comparison. I thought that was the end of something. It turns out it was closer to a clearing. Once that fear stopped running the show, I wasn’t left fearless. I was left noticing something else — something that actually deserved care, in a way I hadn’t been able to see while I was busy guarding against threats that weren’t real.

I came across a teaching recently that gave me language for something I think I’ve been circling for a while without naming it. R.T. Kendall talks about the difference between a dove and a pigeon. They look like cousins. But a pigeon can be trained — it’ll settle anywhere, mate with anything, put up with whatever. A dove won’t. A dove is wild. You can’t domesticate it, and it won’t stay where it isn’t wanted. Kendall’s point is that the Holy Spirit behaves like the dove, not the pigeon. Gentle. Genuinely sensitive. And — this is the word that stopped me — easily grieved.

Easily. Not “grieved by catastrophic failure.” Grieved by the small stuff. The stuff I don’t think twice about.

Paul says it plainly in Ephesians — don’t grieve the Holy Spirit — and then, in the very next breath, tells you exactly how it happens: bitterness, wrath, anger, slander, malice. Not doctrine. Not big dramatic sin. Relational residue. The stuff we carry into a room without meaning to.

I’ve spent a long time protecting myself from exactly this. Not from grieving God — I wasn’t thinking about that at all — but from letting anyone get close enough to grieve. If nobody’s in, nobody can wound you, and if nobody can wound you, there’s nothing to carry. It was a tidy system. It worked, in the sense that it kept me safe. It also meant I was managing people instead of knowing them.

Something’s been loosening in me over the last few weeks that I don’t have a tidy explanation for. I’m letting people closer than I used to. Not performing openness — actually letting them in, without the old scan for what it might cost me. And I keep noticing this strange, quiet peace sitting underneath it, like territory I haven’t been in before.

I think Kendall would say that’s what an ungrieved Spirit feels like. Not fireworks. Just — nothing in the way. He makes this point about two people who are both walking ungrieved being able to sense God together in a way that isn’t otherwise possible. I used to read something like that and think it sounded nice. Now I think it’s just a description of what happens when you stop managing the exits.

I don’t think I’ve arrived anywhere with this. I still catch the old reflex — the flicker of wanting to keep a hand on the door. But I’m noticing it faster than I used to, and noticing it feels like something. Maybe that’s what sensitivity to the Spirit actually looks like day to day — not some heightened spiritual radar, but just catching yourself a little sooner than last time.

Maybe that’s the actual order of things. First you find out how much of your fear was never protecting anything real. Then, once your hands are finally free, you find out what was worth protecting the whole time.

I don’t know what tomorrow’s version of this looks like. I’m not sure I’m supposed to know yet.