“My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?” (Psalm 42:2 NIV)

And the related question: Where can I go and meet with God?

Where can I go where we won’t be interrupted? Where can I talk out loud or cry or sing or sit silently and listen to him?

Meeting with God happens regularly at home, and Jesus contrasted the fruitless, attention-seeking public prayers of the hypocrites with secret prayer at home that God values. “When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you” (Matthew 6:6). Spending time alone with our loving Father is reward in itself.

Yet home is filled with distractions, making prayer difficult. And what about when I’m traveling and won’t see my front door for weeks? Or when I have something pressing to talk to him about and long for deep, intimate connection? Where can I go and meet with God?

Sacred prayer space can be found tucked away in public places. In the Munich Airport, I discovered a simple, quiet prayer room supplied with Bibles and hymnbooks—the perfect place to pray, to sing, to worship. It was a refuge from the stresses of travel as well as a prompt to pray for the people from many nations passing through the airport that day. I left refreshed, having met with God.

Praying in an empty church with no one else there but the Holy Spirit provides a respite from the frantic pace of life. When we lived in Vienna, my friend and I used to meet in the city for apple strudel and then go “church sitting.” We’d slip in the back of an ancient place of worship and be still for a while, then whisper our prayers to God about our children, our husbands, our church, our joys, our sorrows. Those prayers are still being answered.

Memorable moments of meeting with God have happened in these places: the pine forest near our home in Ukraine; on planes, looking at the clouds below and gaining more of a heavenly perspective; on a grassy knoll overlooking the lake at Blackwell Forest Preserve; under a birch tree on the front campus of Wheaton College; in a quiet corner of College Church.

Some prayers are shouted at full volume, fueled by raw emotion that holds nothing back. This may happen when I’m alone in the car, bellowing at God because only he can hear me and I know he’s not shocked by my tirade. Or, Bible open, I borrow the words of psalms that express how I feel. “Hear me, O God, as I voice my complaint.” (64:1) “Be merciful to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eyes grow weak with sorrow, my soul and my body with grief.” (31:9) I’m learning that my angry prayers actually drive me closer to him because he already knows my heart and wants me to come as I am, no pretending, no hiding. I long to be heard and seen and loved, even in my mess. Then he quiets my heart and comforts me, “like a weaned child with its mother.” (131: 2) At those moments, he brings me back to a place of trust, with deepening intimacy and security.

In the last year, most of my tirades had to do with my dad’s recurring skin cancer on his scalp and one violent surgery after another. I yelled at God about the holes in Dad’s body and the wounds in his flesh. In a breathtaking moment, Jesus reminded me of the holes in his own hands and feet and thorns in his brow. He knows. He cares. He suffered for us, and he suffers with us. He came close in a new way that day.

During a trying season of sitting by Dad’s hospital bed, the hospital chapel was a place I could slip into for a few minutes each day to pray for him, to pour out my heart to God and tell him why my soul was downcast and disturbed. (Psalm 42:8) Kneeling before the cross, again I saw that Jesus knows firsthand about physical suffering and he weeps with me. Taking communion with a handful of believers there on a Sunday morning reminded me that Christ’s body was broken for me, and by his wounds I am healed. He gently lifted my eyes upward with an invitation to put my hope in God, for I will yet praise him. (42:11)

Prayer and trust multiplied as others came with me to the chapel and we shared our burdens and lifted up the one we love. We prayed in other times and places, to be sure, yet there was something powerful about interceding with intentionality and purpose in that place with wooden pews and stained glass and echoes of a century of prayers.

The extravagant privilege we have of coming before the Almighty himself, who is seated in the throne room, is staggering. The Book of Revelation shows us an astonishing picture of the Lamb standing in the center of the throne, with the twenty-four elders falling before him in worship, “holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints” (5:8). Those prayers have reached the throne room, fragrant and precious to God.

One Sunday by my dad’s bedside in the hospital in Texas, we read together from Hebrews 4:16: “Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” That afternoon I watched a video of the service from our church in Ukraine and heard that same verse read in Ukrainian. What a gift, connecting Scripture with a very immediate physical need in an American hospital and with our dear brothers and sisters in the worldwide church. Mercy and grace, help in our time of need—available to all believers in all times and places.

My sweet dad is now present with the Lord, no longer suffering, and singing praises like never before. And the Lord is also present with us, comforting and loving us in our grief. A graveside is another powerful place to meet with God and rest in the hope of the resurrection.

How grateful I am to be able to approach the throne of grace and meet with God behind closed doors at home, or anywhere, adding my prayers to the golden bowl of incense and finding mercy and grace.

“And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. To him be the power for ever and ever. Amen.” (1 Peter 5:10-11)