"And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart."
Jeremiah 29:13
I run across people from time to time that tell me they have looked for God, and concluded that he doesn't exist because they haven't heard from him. Many of these people have an incorrect view of what God is, what his gospel entails, etc., but at the core, even if we don't understand fully, God is willing to listen.
One of the first steps is to really try to find out who God is, and that means reading the scriptures, not just listening to our antagonistic relatives or reading online about how some rando guy on a blog thinks God is awful or whatever. To know God, we need to search HIS word, and talk to HIM. We can't get to know our significant others by listening to some person from high school that hated them. Similar idea.
In general though, many of us succeed in finding God, and others fail. In trying to understand why people's experiences are different, one of the big things is this verse. Seeking God isn't a passive act. We can't just wait around for God to "prove" Himself to us. Obviously if we have concluded previously that God isn't there, or aren't willing to take the risk of finding him and then being subject to that knowledge, we're going to find nothing. If we give him a deadline and say show me by this date or make something happen in my life by this date, that isn't going to work either. This is God, not some job applicant that we can brush off if they don't make the deadline. If we really want to know, we have to be serious enough to study and learn all we can about him, we have to be humble enough to accept an answer if it is given to us, and then we have to actually take the step of believing in him enough to attempt talking to Him in prayer. If we are prepared, a lot of times God's love will immediately flood over us, and we will know for sure that he is there... but if it takes time, that's okay too. Sometimes we need to do more, and sometimes we just need to wait a while... maybe for a time with fewer distractions, less stress, less pressure from others, when there are no time constraints and we have the time to spend with God to really listen and feel.
The key to finding God is preparing our hearts. He is not hiding. He is there, waiting to greet us. We need to ready ourselves to be able to feel and know his voice by searching with all of our hearts.
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