River Dwellers

The part of River Dwellers that stayed with me most was also the part that frightened me: what happens when you no longer feel God’s presence?

Rob Reimer uses a river as a picture of life with the Holy Spirit, God present and active in human lives. His argument is that Christians were made for more than religious activity. We need a living relationship with God, and we need to keep making room for his work in us.

Learning to live in the river

Reimer argues that spiritual gifts remain active today and that Christians should continue seeking the Spirit’s fullness. By “fullness,” he means an increasing openness to God’s presence and influence, rather than a one-time religious experience that settles everything.

Silence is one of the practices he emphasizes: making space to listen instead of filling every moment with our own words. I appreciated the practical attention he gives to living this out.

His account of the restless longing in a person’s soul also resonated with me (Kindle location 1308). I understand that longing as a desire for the love only God can give. Christians sometimes call that agape: a word associated with self-giving love. Knowing the term matters less than knowing the love it points toward.

The dark night I did not expect

I had assumed that a “dark night of the soul” simply meant a difficult or awful period of life. Reimer introduced me to a more specific use of the expression: a season in which the felt awareness of God’s presence disappears.

That distinction troubled me. Reimer describes his own uneasiness about what such a season might involve (Kindle location 2541). My reaction went beyond uneasiness. I felt afraid.

Is it wrong to ask God never to let me experience that kind of absence? I could understand the idea of growing in trust without familiar reassurance. I found it much harder to imagine myself doing it.

Using Reimer’s picture, I kept wondering how I could stay in the river without the Spirit nudging me back whenever I began climbing the banks. The fact that someone does not feel God’s presence is not, by itself, proof that God has abandoned them. Even so, the prospect of losing that familiar sense of closeness was hard for me to face.

Where the book persuaded me and where it did not

I enjoyed the book and agreed with much of its insight. My main reservation was the way Reimer relied so heavily on his own experiences to communicate it.

Personal experience can be powerful. It can also leave an intellectually skeptical reader asking for an argument the author has not fully supplied. I worried that some of the wisdom in the book would not reach those readers because of the way it was presented.

For me, the book opened a subject I had misunderstood and pointed me toward other resources on spiritual growth. It also left me with an honest question about my dependence on feeling God near.

I want to live in that river and help others experience Christ’s love. I also want a faith that can keep trusting when the water feels harder to find.

Book discussed

Rob Reimer, River Dwellers: Living in the Fullness of the Spirit (Carpenter’s Son Publishing, 2015), Kindle edition.