Cultivate an Awareness of the Often-Missed Nuances of the Holy Spirit’s Work in Your Life
An Excerpt from
Jeremy Sims
Paperback: IVP Formatio, 2026 Taken from the Introduction of The Way of the Spirit by Jeremy Sims I am a cradle kind who grew up under wooden-beamed ceilings with fans that spun slow above sweaty where perfume and prayer mingled in air no one doubted God still moved. music was faith louder. We sang until floorboards prayed someone waited heaven seemed to lean close enough touch. remember tambourine keeping time worn pews groaning beneath weight saints had learned hope through hardship. In those expect but yet know how recognize quiet. For long thought intimacy sound like thunder. It took years learn most often moves breath. Over last fifteen has led me on journey never expected. have not walked away my Pentecostal if they sunk deeper. believe heals bodies breaks chains fills sanctuaries holy fire. But also cherish quiet fire burned for centuries historic prayers been before voice entered wisdom teach us wait when miracle does come quickly. want be fully rooted vibrant work at same grounded ancient practices sustained faithful both drought abundance. found encounter tradition are rivals. As Jaroslav Pelikan insightfully put it: is living traditionalism dead rel=”noopener”>The Vindication of Tradition: The 1983 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities). The same Spirit who breathes like wind also anchors like a well. My story has not been a departure from where I began, but a deepening into something wider, older, and surprisingly familiar. For twenty-five years I served as a pastor in four Assemblies of God churches, preaching, baptizing, leading retreats, sitting at hospital bedsides, and learning the holy rhythm of ordinary faithfulness. Ministry taught me the weight of people’s questions, but also the ache beneath them: Am I doing this right? Is God really at work in me? I’ve asked those same questions myself more times than I can count. Now, as a professor at Southeastern University, I help young pastors discern their calling and seasoned pastors recognize the Spirit calling them again—not back to what was, but deeper into what is. I see the same tension written across their faces, the longing to be faithful when God feels both near and far, visible and hidden all at once. I often tell my students that the Spirit they’re searching for isn’t waiting on the other side of their success. He’s already within their confusion. The same questions that haunted me as a young pastor have become the sacred ground where my students now learn to listen. We talk about calling, but what we’re really talking about is attention, the slow discovery that holiness often hides inside the ordinary. That’s where this journey began for me: with restlessness. Not deconstruction or rebellion, just the quiet ache of wanting to see what I believed was true. I wanted to trust that God was at work, even when I couldn’t locate him in the noise of my own life. Over time I began to notice that the Spirit’s work was rarely dramatic. It was subtle. Gentle. Ordinary. I realized I had been taught how to feel God but not how to see his subtle movements. Several years ago, I read Brené Brown’s book Atlas of the Heart, in which she introduces the idea of emotional granularity—the ability to name what we feel with precision instead of lumping everything into vague categories like “good” or “bad,” “happy” or “mad.” She says that naming our emotions doesn’t just help us understand ourselves; it changes our capacity to respond and to make sense out of our own lived experiences. That idea has stayed with me. If language can help us locate what’s happening within us, perhaps attentiveness can help us locate what God is doing all around us. What if there’s a kind of spiritual granularity, a way of noticing the fine textures of the Spirit’s presence, the small shifts that are easy to overlook but overflowing with grace? Attention feels less like solving a problem and more like adjusting an aperture. An aperture is the opening in a camera lens that controls how much light is allowed in. Nothing new enters the frame; the light that has always been there simply resolves. When we move from hurry to stillness, edges sharpen and colors return. Intimacy with God is not won by effort so much as revealed by readiness, the slow willingness to look again until what is true comes into focus. For most of my life, I assumed the Spirit was either close or far. But I’ve come to see the Spirit’s movements as a landscape rather than a switch—a rhythm of conviction and comfort, silence and song, hiddenness and revelation. These are not contradictions. They are contours of the same grace. We live in an age where attention has become our most endangered resource. Every sound, every scroll, every urgency competes for it. But what if the real threat to our spiritual lives isn’t disbelief, but distraction? What if the Spirit has not grown silent, but we have grown unable to hear? I’ve come to see that much of the Christian life is not about gaining more faith but giving better attention. Attention is the soil where faith grows. It’s how love learns to see. When we attend to what is small, we begin to glimpse what is holy. Spiritual granularity is not about control—it’s about consent. It’s the willingness to slow down long enough for the Spirit to reveal what has been there all along. Attention, after all, is not just noticing; it is love taking form in awareness. To pay attention is to participate in redemption, to see the world as God sees it: not as random or wasted, but as shimmering with possibility. That is the work of the Spirit. That is the I’ve come to believe that what God desires most is not our clarity, but our closeness. We keep trying to decode the Spirit’s silence, when perhaps the silence is the invitation itself—to slow down, to listen, to look again. This is the slow unlearning of a hurried faith. And it is holy work.
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Content taken from The Way of the Spirit by Jeremy Sims. Copyright © 2026 by Jeremy Sims. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com. All rights reserved.
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