God as lover? Read Hosea… and then listen to Sufjan Stevens “To Be Alone With You.” The church doesn’t talk as much about this idea as they should. I mean, it does seem strange… but that’s just because not many people talk about it. It’s all over the Bible… and it is taking my relationship with God to greater intimacy that I have yet to experience in my life.
Another idea… CS Lewis talks about this, the idea that our body is so intimately connected to our spirituality. In practicing confession, it’s easy for us to just say some apology in our minds to God and think that’s all there is to confession. But think about this… if you were confessing to your lover for hurting her, would you just say you’re sorry without any bodily form of expression of that sorrow? I doubt it. In practicing confession, I’ve found that putting my entire body into it makes it so much more real, and I come to know God so deeply through that. Using normal language that I would use with a lover and not all this Christianese… just doing what feels natural with someone that I would care about… it makes the experience so much more authentic.
It’s so obvious to me in this moment, but I’m learning more and more that your relationship with God is so much like your relationships with people. In fact, the best way to look at it is that your relationships with people are so much like your relationship with God. The way we relate to God should be so natural, so deep, so real, so reverent… and all of our human relationships should be modeled after that. Modeling how we relate to God after how we relate to people just brings all our human junk and brokenness into how we see God… which doesn’t leave us in a good position.
2 years ago