Have You Ever Asked God How He's Doing?

In quantum physics, there is a strange and stubborn phenomenon called the observer effect. A particle like an electron behaves like a wave — spread across multiple possibilities simultaneously — until the moment it is measured. Observed. At that point, the wave collapses into a single, definite state. The act of paying attention, it turns out, is not passive. It participates in determining what becomes real.

To be clear: physicists will tell you that "observation" in this context doesn't require a conscious being. Any physical interaction that registers information collapses the wave function. The universe is doing this to itself constantly. But the principle that emerges is still striking: what something is — what aspect of its nature becomes actual and knowable — depends in part on the nature of the relationship it enters into.

I've been sitting with that idea in a different context. Not electrons and detectors, but prayer. Because I wonder if something similar is true in our relationship with God — and whether we've ever stopped to consider what remains forever potential, forever unactualized, simply because we never truly attend to Him.

What if observation isn't passive in prayer either — and what we attend to shapes what becomes real between us and God?

The Prayer We Almost Never Pray

Most of us come to prayer the same way we come to everything else — with a list. A need. A burden we can't carry alone. We bring our requests, our confessions, our gratitude, and we speak. Then we say amen and move on. The communication is real. But it is almost entirely one-directional.

We never ask God how He's doing.

I don't mean that glibly. I mean it as a serious invitation to a different posture — not performance, not petition, but the kind of attentive presence you'd offer someone you genuinely love. The kind of attention that says: I'm not just here for what you can give me. I'm here for you.

That shift is harder than it sounds. It requires us to hold our own agenda loosely enough to actually notice someone else. And it raises an uncomfortable prior question: do we actually believe God has an inner life worth attending to?

God Has Feelings. Scripture Says So.

This isn't a sentimental projection. The biblical record is consistent and specific. In Genesis 6, before the flood, we read that God was grieved in His heart — not disappointed in a detached, judicial sense, but grieved. The word is personal and interior. In Zephaniah 3:17, God rejoices over His people with singing. In John 11, standing at the tomb of Lazarus, the eternal Word wept — not as performance, but as a Person in relationship responding to loss with His own grief.

"The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing."  — Zephaniah 3:17

If God grieves, delights, rejoices, and weeps — then He is not a cosmic mechanism dispensing outcomes. He is a Person in genuine relationship with His creation. And the history of that relationship, traced through Scripture, shows something remarkable: God responds. Abraham negotiates with Him over Sodom. Moses argues Him out of destroying Israel in the wilderness. Throughout the prophets, God relents in response to human repentance. He is not executing a script. He is in relationship — and relationship, by its nature, moves in more than one direction.

God is not waiting behind a request window. He is present, attentive, and responsive — if we position ourselves to engage Him that way.

The Interface Problem

In systems thinking, an interface is the point where two components exchange information. For the exchange to work, both sides must be capable of sending and receiving. A one-directional interface isn't really an interface at all — it's a broadcast. You can transmit endlessly without it constituting a relationship.

Much of what passes for prayer in modern life is a broadcast. We transmit our needs toward God. We may thank Him for what He's sent back. But we rarely reconfigure ourselves to receive. We rarely go quiet long enough to notice what might be coming the other way.

The Holy Spirit — what Christian Systems Thinking describes as the active communication channel between God and human persons — is not only the mechanism by which God speaks to us. He may also be the way we attune to what God is experiencing. Paul writes in Romans 8 that the Spirit intercedes with groanings too deep for words. That is not a one-way signal. That is a living, responsive connection between persons — and it runs in both directions.

Return to the quantum frame for a moment. The wave function doesn't collapse on its own — it collapses in the context of interaction. What becomes knowable about a particle depends on the nature of the relationship it enters into. Perhaps what becomes knowable about God works similarly. Not that observation changes who God is — He is what He is, eternally and completely. But what becomes visible, particular, and intimate about an inexhaustible Person may depend on the quality of attention we bring. Relationship is the mechanism by which the infinite becomes intimate.

What we attend to in prayer may determine which facets of an inexhaustible God become real to us — not because He changes, but because relationship is how the infinite becomes intimate.

What It Might Actually Look Like

I'm not prescribing a formula. But I'll describe the practice as I've been exploring it.

After the usual opening — gratitude, acknowledgment of who God is — I've started simply asking: "What are you experiencing right now, Lord? What do you see when you look at the world today? What grieves you? What brings you joy?"

And then I go quiet. Not passively. Attentively. The way you'd wait for a friend to answer.

What comes back isn't always dramatic. Sometimes it's a Scripture that surfaces with new weight. Sometimes it's a sudden awareness of someone I haven't thought about in weeks. Sometimes it's a wordless grief or a surprising peace that I didn't arrive with. I can't always verify the source with certainty. But I've noticed that the practice itself changes me — it shifts my posture from consumer to companion.

That shift matters more than I initially realized. Because if I always come to God as the one with needs and He is always the one with resources, I've quietly turned the relationship into a transaction. But the invitation of the gospel is not transaction — it is communion. "Abide in me," Jesus says in John 15. Not "petition me." Abide.

"No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends."  — John 15:15

An Invitation

The Master Architect — the God who designed systems, who built feedback and resilience and responsive relationship into the fabric of creation itself — is not indifferent to His own handiwork. He feels the weight of what is broken. He takes genuine delight in what is being restored.

Physics stumbled onto something in the twentieth century that theologians have always suspected: attention is not passive. What we observe, we participate in. What we attend to becomes more real to us — and perhaps, in the mystery of genuine relationship, more actual between us.

The question is not whether God is available. The question is whether we've ever really shown up — not with a list, but with open hands and a genuine question.

Try it sometime. Set aside the requests, just for a few minutes. Ask God how He's doing. Then wait. Stay with the silence long enough for it to become something other than empty.

You might be surprised what a Person says when someone finally asks.