Ever since Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, men and women have been hiding their deepest selves from one another. That’s why intimacy takes work. However, there is hope! Because God is the designer of relationships, He made you and those around you and knows our hearts, He knows how to help you connect with the key people in your life. Granted, intimacy can be one of the most frightening and challenging things you’ll ever experience, but if you are willing to climb the uphill battle, it can also be one of the most rewarding and satisfying parts of life.
Mature Intimacy is a place in which we can define the self and respect the emotional separateness of the other. Intimacy will not occur as long as we assume that we are the “expert” on how another should handle their relationships. If we find we alternate between silence and distance, or fighting and blaming we can rest assured these behaviors will keep us STUCK by ensuring that problems will not be addressed in a productive way. Problems will arise as well when we look to intimate relationships as our source of self-esteem.
We must be willing to fight for intimacy in our marriages and to fiercely guard it. We fight for it by being attentive to each other’s hearts; by yielding to God in a way that allows us to more easily yield to one another. We guard it by being intentional, considering what pulls us from intimacy and stepping away from those places, considering what brings us life and stepping deliberately into those places.
My lover is mine and I am his; we long to belong. Marriage, as a coming together before God, offers a sense of belonging that mirrors our belonging to the Father. While the vulnerability that intimacy brings is sometimes hard or scary to step into, it is such a wonderfully holy place that God gives us, a place of delighting in one another that echoes of the Father’s delight in us.
Father, forgive me the places where, although I long to belong, I rebel under your covering. Forgive me the places where I choose not to yield. Let me delight so much in You that I can delight in the one you have given me in marriage, that together we might be Yours. For more information see www.fatherlovesyou.net
Mature Intimacy is a place in which we can define the self and respect the emotional separateness of the other. Intimacy will not occur as long as we assume that we are the “expert” on how another should handle their relationships. If we find we alternate between silence and distance, or fighting and blaming we can rest assured these behaviors will keep us STUCK by ensuring that problems will not be addressed in a productive way. Problems will arise as well when we look to intimate relationships as our source of self-esteem.
We must be willing to fight for intimacy in our marriages and to fiercely guard it. We fight for it by being attentive to each other’s hearts; by yielding to God in a way that allows us to more easily yield to one another. We guard it by being intentional, considering what pulls us from intimacy and stepping away from those places, considering what brings us life and stepping deliberately into those places.
My lover is mine and I am his; we long to belong. Marriage, as a coming together before God, offers a sense of belonging that mirrors our belonging to the Father. While the vulnerability that intimacy brings is sometimes hard or scary to step into, it is such a wonderfully holy place that God gives us, a place of delighting in one another that echoes of the Father’s delight in us.
Father, forgive me the places where, although I long to belong, I rebel under your covering. Forgive me the places where I choose not to yield. Let me delight so much in You that I can delight in the one you have given me in marriage, that together we might be Yours. For more information see www.fatherlovesyou.net
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