Intimacy

I crave intimacy. This has been a general theme of my life up until this point. I'm only realizing that now, but when I apply that sentence to the various stages and conditions of my life, it applies. I do the things I do because I crave intimacy.

I want it in every sense of the word. I want to know and be known. I want to share my deepest feelings with someone. I want to comfort and be comforted. I want to hold and be held. I desire emotional and physical intimacy very deeply. I feel incomplete when the yearning strikes me strongest.

Sometimes it hits me when I see a couple who clearly love God and love each other. Sometimes I feel it in especially poignant scenes in movies (Garden State has several scenes that just level me emotionally). Sometimes it'll be something especially beautiful in nature, or in drawn/painted art. The best spiritual talks always do.

But it is music that causes me to yearn the most. I sometimes yearn for the intimacy of being in a band again. There's something unspeakably joyful to me about four guys all giving their all to bring something new into the world. They have to know each other or the songs don't turn out right - they have to be intimate or the magic doesn't happen. I miss playing "We're Going Down" with TL. I miss playing "Drowning Isn't Hard." I miss jamming most of all - the spontaneous outworkings of knowing each other's playing styles intimately. Jams don't work if you don't have intimacy between the band members.

I feel it when I listen to music. "Table for Two" by Caedmon's Call has been a big one for this lately. It starts off like this:

"Danny and I spent another late night over pancakes/talking bout soccer and how every man's just the same./Made speculations about the whos and the whens of our future/how everyone's lonely, but still, we just couldn't complain."

It goes on to outline the basic problem that I have now: a longing for physical intimacy with a woman that is overtaking the desire to do what the narrator knows is right (have faith in God). "Oh, and I just hate being alone," Derek Webb calmly displays. But he comes back with "But I forget whose house I live in."

I often forget that I live in God's house. Sometimes I think it's because I haven't actually lived in the house of God, or that I've just been visiting his goodness. But mostly I just forget that I live there because I don't take the time to explore it. I'm like a man who lives in a mansion and stays in one room, looking out a window and longing to go outside. If I would just embrace the mansion and its joys, which include all of the joys of "outside" and more!

But I don't go, because I am afraid. I am afraid of the unknown, I am afraid of the new, I am afraid of letting things go.

So instead of pouring into this relationship with God, so I can get the intimacy I crave, I long for a relationship with a woman. It's not a bad longing - God created it in me. But it has overtaken my desire to explore God.

This is where my last four or five years come in. I have exchanged the wonder, work and pain of getting to know God more for the wonder, work and pain of male/female relationships. In my mind, chasing after girls (even Godly girls) was much easier and required much less of me than getting to know God.

That is not true. Getting to know God is infinitely easier than getting to know a girl because of this fact: God already knows everything about me. God already loves me. God always, always, always wants what is best for me. I don't have to worry about what God is feeling towards me. He loves me.

This is not always true of a girl. I spent a lot of time trying to 'win girls over to my side' and 'store up good tidings' and all that. I needed a defense against bad moods and unexpected traumas. If life were fair, those things would have worked. But inevitably (because we all are fallen), the good tidings I had stored up would evaporate in the face of someone's pain and suffering. It's the human response. I did it to the girls I dated. I'm not singling myself out as a victim here, other than a victim of my own selfishness.

And so I chased after girls because I could have intimacy with them. I neglected to have intimacy with God, but at that point in my life I was down with that.

Now I am not okay with that. I desire intimacy with God because he is the only one who will remain constant, even through death of those I love and finally me.

The problem is that the desire for physical intimacy that I cultivated with my first three relationships is making it difficult to grasp the concept of intimacy with God. I 'fixed' my yearning for intimacy by making out with girls. I made it go away, and that was what I wanted it to do. It was a good short-term plan. I used it copiously as a short-term plan. I wish I had foresight, but my foresight was hindered by visions of the relationship's future (who ponders post-relationship heart status while in a relationship?, I thought).

Now the long-term is here, and I am feeling the consequences of my selfishness. I miss physical intimacy quite badly, and even more than that, it is getting in the way of me knowing God. I have the yearning knocking on the door of my heart stronger than ever, and I want to turn to God to fill it - he is the one knocking. But my sinful nature (sinful heart), equates the longing with cuddling, hugging, kissing hand-holding and all that. So the more I long for God, the stronger my longing gets to be with a girl.

It's hard to understand intimacy with God in the first place, but when it's all mucked up with a desire for physical intimacy as a consequence of prior selfish choices, it gets very, very hard.

I find that swaying in a hammock is one of the most comforting things to me as of late. It feels like God is rocking me back and forth. It is an awe-inspiring feeling, even if it is only in my head, that God would have physical intimacy with me.

There's a verse somewhere that says God's followers will worship in spirit and in truth. We worship in spirit because God is spirit. I have to be intimate in spirit with him because he is spirit. And it is unfortunate that I made the decisions I did, that have caused me all this trouble. But it is just another thing for God to conquer on the road of my life.

So I struggle to know what "intimacy with God" looks like, feels like, is like. I'm trying to separate it from my ideas and desires for "intimacy with my wife." I am training myself to go to scripture when I crave intimacy; but it is still a truth that I want to cuddle more than I want to run to scripture when I feel the yearning in "Shadow Proves the Sunshine" by Switchfoot.

"Two scared little runaways/hold fast to the break of daylight/The shadow proves the sunshine/The shadow proves the sunshine."

God is always the final word. May you and I both know it as we search for intimacy with God.



The good thing is that I am already known.