A question of Intimacy

Intimacy

What does it mean to be in intimate relationship? When is intimacy appropriate in a relationship? At what level?

I am exploring these questions, pondering my own relationships and friendships. What are they? What should they be? What do I want them to be?   What does God want them to be? Are there different levels of intimacy for different relationships?

Sometimes, I long for closer friendships, but am never really sure how to actually achieve that. Then part of me also loves being alone, exploring creativity, not really wanting to share too much of that with anyone else. I ask myself, is that because past experiences of sharing who I am has lead to misunderstanding, mis-trust, feeling that people want to control me or want to take something from me that I don’t want to give? Feeling that people expect something from me that I don’t want to give? Or is not that at all – am I really an introvert, actually quite happy enjoying my own company for the most part.

Intimacy in relationship requires trust on both sides, it requires deeply giving –  vulnerably, openly. True intimacy is raw, bare, boundaryless. Do I want that? Do I have what it takes to give that? Or even receive it?

Yet at times I crave it, I want it so badly. Do I just let go and let it happen organically by dropping the guardrails? Do I search for it, seek it out, study it, work out how to “do it”, work out what it even really means?

I know the answer is in letting go and letting God teach me what that means. He is the one who reached out to us to start with. He bared his soul when the crowds mocked him and he didn’t say a word. His love was so great in that moment, his passion for us so intense, that his heart burned for us, reaching out in forgiveness. He was showing no matter what we’ve done to him or what we’ve done to anyone, he was willing to look past that. He wanted us so badly, he burned for us so strongly, that no level of sin or hatred, or anger or rebellion could turn him away from us. It was his passion for us that he could endure the cross – that he had to endure the cross. He had to suffer it to win the prize – of sharing eternity with us, an eternity of intimacy, completeness, deepness of breath, of life. Nothing could get in the way of his love for us. He conquered it, he conquered the things that so easily try to take us out. He showed us we could do it, we could rise above, we could go through the fire, be refined and know him.

He showed us the deepest level of intimacy there is – complete vulnerability. There is no question he had the power to remove himself from the cross and end his own suffering in his fleshly body right there and then. He denied his own body! Every part of his being – his emotions, his soul, his body, his mind, his strength – was all laid bare for the whole world to see. It remains on display for the whole world to see – it is written in his living, breathing word, and his word will never pass away. Generation to generation speak of it, preach it, declare it, passionately describe it and reveal the depths of it to all who will listen.

Can I give him my all? Will I give him my all? Can I give him in return to what he has given me? Maybe not in this life, but maybe I will. But I want to. How do I even start? What does God require of me, or maybe the question should be – what does he desire of me? After all, isn’t intimacy about desire, about longing, about craving, about passion, about burning, about intensity.

Why do we fear it? Why do we fear what we long for? Do we fear it is a carrot dangling in front of us that we can never actually reach out and lay hold of? I’m often tempted to think and feel that way, but is that really truth? Bethel lays it out so well – “You don’t give your heart in pieces. You don’t hide yourself to tease us.”

Once I am completely his, I am his. Even if I thought I wanted to leave, or made some attempt at leaving because of the lies I’ve been told and somehow believe, I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t even try. When I was 17, I decided that being a Christian was too confining and restrictive. I wanted to be free. I decided I would follow the world and follow my feelings, my passions, whatever I wanted to do or become. I was in the van on the way back from youth group when the thoughts of where I thought my true freedom lay came to me. As I was stepping out of the van, back into the boarding house, I knew I could never do it. I was entwined with him, I was one with him. He was my truth. He is my truth. I am one with him.

He was willing to lay himself bare, to take the frightening and very real risk of rejection by the very ones he so passionately longed to dwell with and within. The whole world! We worry so much about that one person or our peers or those we desperately want to love us and it hurts us when they don’t. Yet he laid himself out to the world! … knowing that so many would reject him, misunderstand him, mistrust him and even persecute him. Nothing stopped his love for the entire world!

That’s the level of intimacy he is offering you and me – boundaryless, untarnished, pure, completely transparent.  May we learn and understand how to respond to him in the intimacy he desires.