Show Me Your Glory

I used to read that line as poetry. Moses, mid-conversation with God, asking for a little more — a glimpse, a feeling, a mountaintop moment to carry back down. I missed what he was actually requesting, and what it would cost him.

The word underneath our English word glory is kavod. It means weight. Heaviness. Something so real it presses on the room. So when Moses says show me your glory, he isn’t asking for a nice service. He’s asking to stand in the full weight of God — and God’s own answer is that no one can see His face and live.

That’s the prayer my wife and I have been praying for most of our marriage. It took us years to understand what we were really asking for.

Larissa and I connected, from the very beginning, on faith. Different rooms, same fire. She was raised Catholic and converted to Christianity with her mother as a child, still carrying her Brazilian Pentecostal roots — roots that overlapped with my own Pentecostal formation more than either of us expected.

What bonded us wasn’t agreement on doctrine. It was hunger. We both loved to worship. We always found ourselves back at church. And we both knew, from our formative years, what it was to be in a room when God’s glory filled it — an encounter that left an impression nothing else could counterfeit.

Watching each other in those moments only made us hungrier.

Here’s the tension. Those encounters were real — and they were rare. There were long stretches where we didn’t feel that glory, where we walked into the building and walked back out carrying the same weight we came in with.

That gap did something in us. Not bitterness. Closer to a righteous indignation — a refusal to accept spiritual emptiness as the baseline. We didn’t want a good show. We wanted the weight back. Lights, a setlist, a feeling that evaporated somewhere in the parking lot — we’d had enough of presence you couldn’t carry past the lobby. We wanted to bask in His presence routinely, not stumble into it once a season.

So we stopped waiting for the room to give us what only God could. We started pressing in ourselves.

It began when we were still just boyfriend and girlfriend — reading through Job, First and Second Samuel, the Gospels, Revelation. Anything we could get into. We’d talk for hours, debating our perspectives, Old Testament against New, her experience against mine.

We didn’t always land in the same place. But one thing held across every disagreement: we had both felt God’s glory, and we both wanted to understand it. What does it mean to maintain it? To have it become your guiding force — a pillar of fire in the dark, a covering by day — through grief, through leadership shifts, through the difficult and the good alike?

The marriage became a study environment long before it became anything else.

And the longer we studied, the more we saw the same thread running through all of it. The Bible, we realized, is telling one centralized story. God has always wanted to dwell with His children. Glory is the thread that reveals the plan.

You can trace it the whole way through:

Whether through fire by night, cloud by day, in a tent, in a Man, or in a city yet to come — God always had a plan to dwell with us. It was the point of creation in the first place.

It isn’t a fragmented set of Bible lessons. It’s the oldest story ever told — a love story. God wanting to be with His children, the rupture our own failure caused, the veil torn, the presence returned to live inside us.

A few weeks ago, Larissa and I set our faces for a seven-day fast — we called it Set Your Face, the way Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem (Luke 9:51), the way Isaiah set his like a flint (Isa 50:7). Not a mood. A direction. Seven days pointed one way. We came in spiritually hungry on purpose, starved for a fresh spring of His presence, pulling away anything that might keep us from hearing Him. Hunger wasn’t the enemy of that week; it was the doorway. And like Daniel — who set his heart to understand and to chasten himself — we found that heaven meets the hungry from the first day.

And as we asked, His glory started falling in the most ordinary places. Friends stopped by to say goodbye before a trip — ten minutes, in and out — and it turned into prophecy in the doorway. A mundane work meeting broke open into teary-eyed, glory-filled petition. A simple family conversation ended with the two of us on our faces, undone in His presence.

We asked God to show us His glory — and it fell. It began to change us from the inside out. Broken clay, taken up by the Potter and used for supernatural encounters unlike anything we had ever known.

Each day pressed on something real.

That fasting is not willpower but a bowed soul — emptying our hands so He could fill them.

That we were made to be fed by God Himself, not by men.

That beneath every human voice that comes and goes is one Shepherd who never rotates.

That even our zeal for His house had to be purified — burned clean of pride until it was intercession and not indictment.

That our bodies, and the people we love, belong in the hands that formed them.

That our anxieties had to come off the throne so His Kingdom could sit there first.

And that we would move only when the cloud moved — never bolting in impatience, never rooting ourselves in fear.

And the asking cost me. The fast was the easy part — hunger keeps a calendar; it ends. What it surfaced didn’t. I’d made peace with one thing: I am not my father’s pulpit. I wasn’t built to pastor, and I’d stopped pretending otherwise. But I’d let that truth harden into a hiding place — not a pastor quietly became not called, and not called became leave me comfortable.

Ask God for glory and He gets to answer. His answer was that He wanted to use me in a way I didn’t want to be used — further into ministry, not out of it. I’m still not my father. But I am being called to minister, and I had to stop using the first to dodge the second.

That’s where longing turned into commitment. We surrendered ourselves and asked Him to use us. We made a pledge: we don’t want to be anywhere His glory is not. Like the Israelites, we’ll let His all-consuming fire be our guide — our force in battle, our refuge, the presence dwelling in us so it can spread.

So we built something. A community group called The Returning Glory.

It walks that oldest story — the love story — from the desire for communion, to the rupture, to the torn veil, to the indwelling presence, and finally to the heart postures it takes to keep the glory once it comes. We didn’t start with teaching others. We started by understanding it ourselves, building the lessons, making sure we’d actually walked the ground before we asked anyone else to.

Larissa once belonged to discipleship groups her church called cells — rooms with real doctrine, real curriculum, real lessons. That became our model. So we made the whole thing reproducible: a website, booklets, leadership guides — everything someone would need to gather a few people and walk this for themselves. Built with intention. Built with love. Built to be handed over to God’s people and shared as broadly as it can go.

Because the prayer was never show me a service. It was show me your glory. And the answer, the whole way from Eden to the New City, has always been the same: God making room to dwell with us — and asking whether we’ll make room for Him.