For The Institue of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies, St.Stephen’s University, Essentials Green Online Worship Values, with Dan Wilt.
“Intimacy, in any relationship, does not just happen when the lights are low and the music soft…Intimacy is a posture, a positioning, of one heart toward another.” 1
We have intimate moments when we sit together and weep and mourn, or hold one another in love, but that trust is built through days of laughing together and enjoying friendship together.
So much of how I see God is formed in my relationships with others. Our community has always held high a standard of friendship, and I have learned much about love and intimacy in that. Two years ago, my husband and I came to a crisis in our marriage. I wasn’t sure, after only two years, if we would stay married, which was devastating to both of us. Our good friends, who we had worshiped with, led with, cried with, prayed with, and laughed with, came to our aid. We were able to be honest with them to the point of extreme pain. None of them knew the answers for our situation, but they all believed in us and our marriage and wanted to fight for us. They made the time to walk a horrible situation through, wading through my outbursts, my husbands fears, through all the layers of lies and misconceptions we had built in our lives, until we got to the raw and tender part of our hearts. This is when we started to heal.
I see God in those people. I know intimacy is with him directly through prayer and devotion and seeing him around us in nature and life, but I began to know him so much more intimately through our marriage. Seeing my husbands loyalty and unwavering devotion showed me a part of God’s heart I could never have otherwise known. I saw that God would never leave, no matter what I have done or how I’ve failed him.
Brian Doerkson says the whole story of God and the Bible is relationship. 2 And although in the Old Testament especially we see a direct connection between man and God (Moses on the mountain, Abraham and Isaac, etc.) in the New Testament there is a community building that is showing God to each other. Jesus made that relationship human.
I don’t want to make the mistake of supplementing my time with God alone only with human relationships. I think our community in it’s fervor to build friendships with one another at times lacks the desire to relate to God on a vertical level as well. I have seen the phrase “worship is a lifestyle” misunderstood to mean that corporate worship takes a back seat to conversations about God. I never want to talk about God more than I talk to him. However I know I fall short in this area often.
Integrity walks hand in hand with intimacy. When we are intimate with our creator and with those around us in honest and accountable relationships (which I believe only come through friendship) we are confronted with integrity at each moment. When we are intimate, we cannot be fake, we can’t hide behind a song or a dance. Those around us know our hearts and see through our gestures of falsehood, whether or not we even know ourselves that we are hiding.
I have always worn my heart of my sleeve. I do not hide much, although I have had to learn to be wise in that, too. But for the most part I don’t find value in keeping my soul hidden. I am who I am, and the more I can be open, the more others can be encouraged to be open as well.
This is my desire. To be a people who aren’t afraid to trust, to bare our hearts and souls, and know that someone is there who isn’t afraid of knowing us at that deepest place.
1. Dan Wilt, The Values of Intimacy and Integrity, Essentials Green, 2009
2. Brian Doerkson, Intimacy, Video, Essentials Green, 2009
Here is a song I wrote about Intimacy
Musings...words, worship, life 