On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.
I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.
I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.
Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.
A couple weeks ago I asked the question in this newsletter, is intimacy with God possible? I’ve asked that question myself over the past forty years—and it has been a pretty dry walk waiting for an answer.
Have you wondered the same thing—what does abide mean? Am I already supposed to know how to do this? Why do I know nothing about this? Help!
Here’s what has changed in my life.
I processed past traumatic events that had created beliefs which kept me stuck.
I began to internalize the truth about God’s immense love for me.
I spent time waiting for God to be with me, asking him to do just that.
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To start with, here’s a factor you likely haven’t considered. It affects many people as they learn to relate closely with God. It’s possible that traumatic events in your past have created places where you’re emotionally stuck. You’re living with rules of engagement in life that aren’t true—they are based on what you learned to do to survive challenges in the past or on how you interpreted things that happened to you.
You may have heard that people who didn’t have a good earthly father have a hard time accepting the love of their heavenly father, which makes sense. But you may have dismissed this as irrelevant. “I had a good dad and my life has really been pretty fortunate, so this doesn’t apply to me.”
But consider this. If you have a history of depression, anxiety or panic, and definitely if you’ve been diagnosed with post traumatic stress syndrome, you should know these events in life do not have to be horrible to affect you. When you’re a child, you have no framework with which to evaluate the events that happen to you other than what you have been given by the people you trust. You have no way to analyze what it means when you’re bullied or lose a family pet you were crazy about. These events that don’t seem so big can affect your mental health years later. And if they can affect your mental health—they can affect your relationship with God.
If you deal with mental health issues or have difficult relationships with family and close friends or simply want to know God more closely, seek out a therapist who knows trauma. One who is certified to implement eye movement desensitization reprocessing (EMDR) can help you process it. EMDR is simple, non-invasive and allows your brain to resolve past events, and it has been proven highly effective. It is also beneficial for depression and for anxiety. Therapists know that most people have been traumatized in their lives at some point and that people who are struggling in relationships, whether human or divine, usually have real reasons for those struggles of which they may be unaware.
How did this process work for me?
My therapist posed this question at the first appointment: “When you are anxious, how old do you feel?” I felt like a baby or toddler, completely helpless. He asked me to tell him about my earliest memory, which I did at our next meeting. That memory was of an incident when I was three or four. We were at a family retreat in California. My parents sent me out to walk a path by myself. For the retreat attendees, walking this path symbolized the life journey each of us would make—and that we would walk it alone.
I remembered the event, the group singing in the pavilion, the sun, the trees above me. I was ashamed to not be brave enough to want to go, and felt I didn’t do it well; I ended up falling in a creek and being fished out by the next grown-up who came by. Through therapy, I learned that my patterns of the fear of being alone and the belief that I was responsible to figure life out by myself began at that time. And I had completely misinterpreted what happened that day, believing I had been a failure. Once I was able to process the experience, which is what EMDR allows the mind to do, it lost its power over how I thought. I no longer thought that God would not want me when I couldn’t perform. I was able to not only understand logically why those beliefs about myself were false, but I was able to internalize that truth.
Now are we getting somewhere?
The second thing that changed my ability to experience God’s presence was an outflow of the first. This is the flip side of undoing the lies.
When you have been told about the power of grace, that’s a great asset. If you have received loving encouragement on the depth of God’s love from sermons or books or podcasts, that’s great. If you have been reminded by people who love you and people you trust that there is nothing you can do to make Jesus love you more and nothing you can do to make him love you less, I thank God for that truth being spoken to you. It’s more obvious in the New Testament because Jesus, but the unfailing love is there from the beginning: in the Old Testament, God doesn’t give up on his people just because they repeatedly abandon him and do whatever they want. He is faithful because he loves them, and being with them is exactly what he wants.
This is what the Bible shows us. Yet it may not be what you functionally believe.
All the hearing in the world does not necessarily sink in to the heart. And the heart is where your treasure truly is. It’s in the heart, not just in your mind, there in the depths of the real you, where you will dwell with God and enjoy Jesus’ company.
So allow your mind to dwell on the truth. Ask God to remove from your mind the lies that may prevent you from accepting the reality of his love. Tell yourself, out loud, that you are included in this gracious and wonderful offer. It’s true. You know it’s true for other people. So it must be true for you.
Be aware, there can be a barrier to the internalization of God’s great love: the worldview you learned years ago can make the love difficult to receive. For me, utilizing EMDR therapy enabled my mind to process the stories I’d been telling myself and come out the other side with the power of those beliefs broken. If you need to loop back to therapy as you soak in the truth of God’s love, that’s quite typical.
Lastly, you will benefit mightily from resources that draw your heart closer to Jesus, and that model time spent with him, growing closer in union to him, as he described in the gospel of John before he went out to the cross. Many devotional books present various nuggets of truth or highlight a quality that a Christian needs to develop. That’s fine. But it’s not what you ultimately need. You need a way to be with Jesus as you are and to begin to comprehend that he knows you and wants you to be transformed through his presence as your intimate friend, companion, and lover.
I recommend these devotional books to read and pray through—both are written as if Jesus is actually speaking to you. Jesus Calling: Enjoying Peace in His Presence by Sarah Young and Come Away My Beloved by Frances J. Roberts are great for nourishing the personal back and forth conversation between you and God.
Waking the Dead by John Eldredge practically explains how to open your heart to the truth, invite Jesus to come close to you, and engage in actions that nourish your soul. I recommend any of Eldredge’s books. They don’t address discipleship by hitting the highlights of prayer, Bible reading, meditation, fasting, service and fellowship (as good as those things are). Instead, what does your heart need to know, trust, and take in? Do you believe you are loved by the one person who can actually do for you what you most need but cannot do for yourself?
Do you realize that what Jesus wants most is not your faith, not your obedience, but friendship with you, intimacy, union? That’s what he wants. And that union is your spring, fountain and river of life.
To increase the refreshment of your soul, I recommend Eldredge’s companion app, The One Minute Pause. I never dreamed that I, a smart phone holdout, would recommend an app, but I do. You can start with the pauses—a peaceful way of “stop for a minute to just rest in Jesus”—that are literally one minute long. As you desire more, you can benefit from the 3, 5 and 10 minute pauses. Prior to using this app, I seemed unable to meditate, although I knew it was a spiritual discipline that brought rewards. But this app assists meditation without my having to fight to get there. I start the morning’s pause, and I am submerged in the love of God.
Even better, the app now contains a 30 day program (which doesn’t have to be completed in 30 days) that guides you deeper into communion with Christ and strengthens your resilience. It assists you to develop spiritual resilience, but you additionally grow in practical resilience, in the day to day building up of peace that empowers you in the rough difficulties that are this life.
The greatest gift I have been granted through this process is spending time with Jesus. I did not know how to do that before. Now, I turn my thoughts and my heart toward him, asking him to come near. Through the process I learned with the 30 days to resilience program on the app, I spend time with him, receiving his love, seeing the beauty of the world together. Mountains? Beach? Gardens? Vistas of great, glorious distances? Yes, and more. He responds to my questions and thoughts often, and that frequently is in ways I did not expect and could not have made up. He even has a sense of humor! We enjoy being together, being friends, closest friends.
Through this time I have spent cultivating union with Jesus, it seems he was just waiting for me to open that door and invite him in. These changes I’ve experienced have made the way to fullness of life.
It’s abundant life, which is exactly what my bond with the prince of peace was meant to be.
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Now on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.’”