Intimacy with God is the primary pursuit of my life. It’s the overarching theme through all my seasons. It’s my deepest passion. Some mornings though, what gets me out of bed is coffee and video games. How dare you?! You can’t say that! The only thing that’s supposed to get you out of bed is Jesus!
Jokes aside, I think I’ve said, “You can have my whole heart God.”, about a hundred thousand times. It almost always felt a little bit like when a toddler says they want to be a dinosaur when they grow up. I’ve come to learn that the reason is because when one lies to themself or others about their genuine feelings (which I have done) it creates a betrayal in their relationship with themself and shuts off a part of their heart through agreement with shame. They lose access to the parts of their heart they’ve denied so when they come to offer their whole heart to God, they don’t actually have their whole heart to offer.
That’s what was going on with me when I’d say, “I just give you all of me God.”
It’s the all-in sacrifice, only for the super hardcore. I thought I was willing to pledge all of my future breaths and heartbeats to God for whatever purpose He may have in store for me. As I’ve progressed with a core value for authenticity, these types of superlative phrases have begun to feel shallow. I’ve pledged all my future breaths and blinks and snorts and sneezes to the Lord so many times I’ve lost count but I never truly had any real understanding of what I was saying. In response to major, powerful prayers I prayed, several seasons He’s brought me to and through have been more difficult than I had ever imagined they could be and I wonder if I’d known how difficult those times would be if I would have chosen to go through with them or if I would even have prayed those dangerous prayers in the first place. What brought me through those times though was His dynamic presence and His voice. I’m mostly referring to the season where He answered my prayer when I asked Him to help me trust Him authentically. I thought I was asking for a snap-your-fingers miracle change in my thinking, not a months and years long arduous process where He proved Himself to me over and over in situations I found genuinely scary (because I didn’t really trust Him).
The, “You can have it all”, promises I made weren’t worthless. He understands us even when we don’t understand ourselves. He takes what we intend to say and hears us. Even if we have no idea what we’re promising, God knows it. He thinks it’s cute but He certainly doesn’t think we know what we’re saying. We’re trying to just say the biggest thing we can muster. It’s more than a little presumptive to boast that in future circumstances which I can’t project, that I choose now how I’ll respond then. I’ve found that for me, in those moments where power moves need to be made, past oaths weren’t of any value to me. What was of value in those days and moments was connection to the Presence and Voice of God.
I think James 4:13-16 kind of articulates my point in a slightly different way. James exhorts the readers to be careful making bold claims about their future because, “you are but a wisp of vapor that is visible for a little while and then disappears. Instead say, If the Lord is willing, we shall live and we shall do this or that.”
To extrapolate a bit, I think that we all need security and everyone on the planet takes action in their life to that end. We don’t fully know what we are and we can’t know what we’re becoming AND we can’t imagine what God is intending to do in our lives because His goodness, wisdom and power are infinitely beyond our most daring hopes. (Ephesians 3:20 sorta)
As time goes on I’ve just become less and less impressed with superlative language. Always, never, forever, etc. Don’t get me wrong, in 1994 I sang that song, “I could sing of Your love forever”, enough times that it really did feel like I might continue singing that song forever. But guess what? At some point I got tired of singing that song and stopped. In fact, I couldn’t sing of His love forever. I’m poking fun at an old song purely for the sake of highlighting that I am a finite being with limitations that the Lord intentionally made me with. It would be way more true that He could sing of my love forever. It’s probably not even true that I’ll sing of His love every day. I’m honestly not trying to just nitpick an old (very precious) song. I’m trying to articulate the paths I’ve found to the deep places in the heart of God so that others can make the journey for themselves.
God doesn’t need me to claim I have more for Him than I do. He doesn’t need assurance from me about my future as though I were the all powerful one in this story.
Anyway, any future I project is going to use my current understanding and revelation of who God is and project it out into the future. The trouble with that is that He’s kinder and better and way more awesome than I can even imagine and so I can’t actually project how surprisingly good He is actually going to be in my life. I can’t project my interactions with God that will take place tomorrow and all it takes is one profound encounter to dramatically alter the course of the entire story. Whenever I create projections of the future, I’m playing the role of God in that future and I’m inadvertantly projecting a future where He isn’t as good as He really is or will be in my real future. He’s not asking me to assure Him what our future together will look like. He’s asking me to trust Him and go with Him into the wild unknown.
Connection with God is intrinsically linked to how we connect with the people in our lives. Here’s something about authentic connection that marriage has taught me. My wife sometimes asks me to tell her what I love about her. If I were to respond with, “I just love everything about you.”, in that moment, it wouldn’t hit. It wouldn’t get in. The truth is, I always love many of the same things about her but the moments she feels the most loved are those spontaneous moments where she does or says something that sparks the realization in me that I love that aspect of her. Often it’s when she’s doing something weird and I’m just taken aback at how much I am in absolute, powerful, profuse, gushing love with how eccentric and unique she is. Expressing the fresh moment when it’s fresh communicates deep love. I think there’s something here that can contribute to our intimacy with God.
What’s sacred to God is what’s genuinely yours to give Him right now.
I’ve gotten more connection with God through authentic, vulnerable truth than I have through finding the biggest language I can to say the biggest thing possible. In fact the parts of my heart that I had put to death He brought back to life when I humbled myself and began becoming vulnerable with God and digging deep to find the truest truth to bring to Him. Even when the truest truth was that I had felt abandoned by Him for years. Even when the truest truth was that I had worshipped the sound of my own voice. Even when the truest truth was that I was tired and had nothing left to bring. It’s been in those moments when I’ve ripped my heart instead of my garments that I’ve experienced realms of His presence that brought the dead places in my heart back to life. (Joel 2:13)
So these days I’m much less inclined to brag to God about how good of a Christian I’m going to be from now till forever. I just want to bring Him everything that I genuinely have in my hands today. And then do it again tomorrow.
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The Weirdo Christian 