Come On Home!

When I officially started dating my wife during the second week of school during our senior year in high school, it was an instant connection!  I had dated or what would probably better be defined as “hung out” with another young lady (a mutual friend of ours) during the summer between our junior and senior year, but it was more of a general friendship than anything else.  When Piper and I started our daily routine of walks through the school corridors and around the P.E. fields at lunch, it was like we had known each other all of our lives.  Ha… we even got in trouble by the school principal for walking in front of the school at lunch because we were holding hands in public!  That’s why we switched to the fields that were not visible from his office windows!  (Ah come on... you would have done the same thing!)

But like I said, it was an immediate connection of our hearts.  I felt like I could share ANYTHING with her and she felt the same with me.  In some respects, it was kind of uncanny!  During those early times together we shared openly and intimately from the deepest recesses of our hearts with total trust in each other.  And that is a practice that has continued throughout our 43 years together. 

I think that this is probably the hardest part of living with my wife’s current battle with Alzheimer’s.  Even though I still intimately share with her on a daily basis, the conversation is pretty much one sided as she no longer has the ability (in the natural) to fully comprehend and/or respond back to me with more than just a few short words of agreement or understanding.  This breach in the unique intimacy that made us one in union through Christ, the ability to almost think and act as one, the foundation that made us a team in life is almost unbearable at times, but as I have mentioned before, it is my continually fed faith and focus on Jesus and His Word that keeps me together during the roughest times.

This morning as I was reading about intimacy with God from my new book “Signs, Wonders and a Baptist Preacher” by Chad Norris, a Southern Baptist Pastor in South Carolina, I thought about all of this and then suddenly began to consider how our loving heavenly Father must feel when we breach the intimacy we once had with Him.  In Jeremiah 9:23 -24 the Lord tells us that people should not brag about their worldly wisdom, strength or riches, but “if they want to brag, they should brag that they understand and know me.” (God’s Word ©)  The word “know” is the Hebrew word “yada” which refers to an intimate knowledge of God.  In the Greek it is translated “ginosko” which is the word used in Ephesians 3:19 where Paul prays for us “to know the love of Christ.”  Once again talking about an intimacy such as shared between a husband and wife.

Just as I long for a return of that intimacy between my wife and I, the Lord longs for that intimacy between you and Him as well.  Such a closeness that His thoughts and His words and His actions becomes yours.  Where our loving heavenly Father and you become as one!  Isn’t it about time that you came back into that meaningful, unique and wonderful relationship with Him?  He is just waiting to hear your voice again.  Let this weekend be the re-beginning of a budding relationship and closeness to our heavenly Father.  Have a great weekend.  Stay in tune to His Word, and keep asking yourself… “What am I expecting today?”