What Does God Have to Do with Intimacy? Part 1

It is hard to understand what our relationships with others are to look like until we have a personal relationship with our creator God.   Until we have crawled into His loving presence and have experienced His grace, we cannot fully comprehend what it means to completely trust without fear of rejection.  Until we have experienced His unconditional love, it is virtually impossible to understand true intimacy.  Unfortunately, this all-consuming knowledge of God did not happen until after I was married.

To say my relationship with Woody suffered much during the first several years of our marriage is an understatement.  I was a brand new, recommitted Christian, and my husband was somewhat Gnostic.  He believed in a God; he just wasn’t sure how personal or real that “God” should be.  To complicate matters, we had had a child before our nuptials.  To start off a marriage with a child and unequally yoked had definitely not been God’s plan.  

During my first year of marriage, I began to feel God’s loving presence as He wooed me back into a committed relationship with Him.  I fell “head over heels” in love with our wonderful Creator and everything in my life took on a new appearance.  God transformed my ideas as to the type of wife and mother I should be.  The journey, nonetheless, would prove to be difficult and full of obstacles, the biggest obstacle being my pride.

I praise God that during this time Woody was patient and stayed the course.  The new Christian I had become was judgmental, stubborn, and self-righteous.  Woody’s every action came under my scrutinizing gaze.  If he did anything that I deemed “un-Christ-like,” I was the first to notify him of it.  Our relationship did not grow closer as it should have.  My faith had put a wedge between us.  God slowly changed my heart, and as I matured I saw my sin of pride for what it was.  My stubbornness became submission; my judgmental, self-righteousness became humility.  I learned to bite my tongue and let God deal with Woody’s heart.  Regrettably, the damage had been done in my relationship with him.  We had become so emotionally distant that I didn’t know how to traverse the expanse that separated us.

It was during this time that I came to the realization that intimacy has absolutely nothing to do with sex and everything to do with a spiritual connection.  God has everything to do with intimacy.  He created you to have an intimate relationship with your spouse.  Somehow during the course of history, we have skewed the definition of intimacy that God has planned for His children.  The first step in regaining that closeness is understanding God’s plan for marriage and how God is intricately involved in our relationships.  Only then can we achieve intimacy with another person.