God wants us to have access to the supernatural, spiritual realm; in fact, since we are now alive in Him because of His love and mercy, this is now our ‘new normal.’ The question remains, however: ‘how do we learn to balance the spiritual with the physical?’ How do we ‘grow into’ the spiritual?
There is a simple test for how far you have come into the spiritual realm, and this is ‘what does it take for you to pray?’ If prayer is a last resort, something to be done only in times of real emergency when we have exhausted every other option, we will not make much progress spiritually. We need to pray in order to become more spiritually sensitive, and as we become more spiritually sensitive, we will want to pray more!
One of the hardest things for us is learning to recognise when God is speaking to us. He may speak to us in an audible voice, but quite often, our connection to the spiritual realm comes through thoughts or feelings and it can be hard to discern if this is our own ideas or God’s. What matters is that we are tuned in to God’s word so that we know the kinds of things He says and we then need to take baby steps in responding to God’s voice. That often leaves us feeling uncomfortable; after all, sometimes the ideas we have are odd, to say the least! But as we respond to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, we realise we have an open invitation to live in balance with the physical and the spiritual, to live in this augmented reality. All God really requires is our willingness to hear and obey. If we pray, ‘God, use me’, be prepared to hear God’s voice and obey it!