intimacy and honesty: run to it with passion!
We’ve started a tradition on our team. If we remember to, every night when we’re together we ask a “burning question” before we go to bed. One person/one question per night and everyone answers. It’s a chance for us to get to know each other more by asking the little questions that make us unique. From “What are you afraid of?” to “What’s your favorite Pop-tart?” much gets let out and revealed.
My question the other day: When was your first kiss?
My answer: His name was Kyle. We were at church. I was standing next to my brother and he was at the other end of the large room before Sunday School began. My brother told me to go over and kiss him. I always listen to him. So, I did. I ran over, tackled Kyle to the ground, and kissed him. I think I even knocked the red lollipop out of his mouth. I was three-years-old.
“An honest answer is like a kiss on the lips.” Proverbs 24:26
I found this verse sometime in junior high school and it stuck close to my heart. Honesty is something special, something true, something honored. Honesty is a treasure that can build amazing relationships. So run after it with passion and zeal and excitement.
Run towards honesty with God, too. Or run back. I started a new journal at which I thought was the perfect time, to start new and fresh. But now I am just writing things down in two separate journals. In my new fresh journal are verses, song quotes, maybe what I was thinking, sermons… And jotted in the middle of another notebook is what I hate, what I’m really feeling and crying out from my heart, the things that I don’t want to open up about or be made known. I want to forget them before they’re even made known fully to me.
Wait, I’m still thinking that this holy connection is based on what I do or don’t do. That I need to be a certain something for God to still draw close to me. But this invitation is an answer to an honest prayer I’ve been asking for a long while. I’ve asked that my heartbeat is the same as my God’s. That my life is so closely connected to my Father’s I’m unmistakably His. That loving God is so habitually ingrained in my being that nothing else happens. That I can look so far in my Savior’s eyes that nothing else comes into view. For that to happen we’ll have to be intimately close. True intimacy is what I’m longing for. That’s my bottom line.