As for me, to be near to God is my happiness.

Pss. 73:28

One of the interesting things about watching people relate to each other is what kind of space or distance they maintain while interacting. Sometimes there’s barely a hair’s breadth of separation (as it was among my Italian relatives and Jewish friends). Boundaries – physical, emotional, aural – lack precise, or seemingly any definition.

Then there are others (my father’s northern European side of the family, our Scandinavian friends from Minnesota) for whom no personal space is too wide.

So where does God fit on the spectrum of relational distance? Is he more like the my New York congregation, where intrusiveness was an art form? Or does he resemble my midwestern brothers and sisters who love from afar? Does our view of divine nearness correspond to the biblical view or do we make it conform to our cultural expectations?

There are two obvious perspectives to consider here. The first is the God’s-eye view; the second, our human disposition. And then there is the comparative exercise that helps us see where the two diverge or converge. Once we see where the differences lie, we can ask what we can or should do about them. Or, perhaps more importantly, what God is seeking to do about them.

Before we take full flight here, I think we have to ask a question. What about this word, “intimacy”? On the one hand, we casually toss around the idea as if we were utterly familiar with its meaning and experience. I can’t begin to count the number of songs that profess the certainty that we want intimacy with God. And yet it also generates a decent level of discomfort if we examine it too closely.

Why the schizophrenic reaction? I can immediately see two reasons. The first is that God has created us for nearness. Once again we resonate with that anthem of relational humility and satisfaction from Psalms 73, v. 28: To be close to God is our happiness. There is simply nothing that defines us better as humans than our being known by and knowing, being loved by and loving the One who is the source of all good. In every human heart lies the desire to be at home with Goodness himself. And yet we often deny ourselves the pleasure.

The second – a primary source of our allergy to intimacy – is that what the Lord is looking for is essentially a state of being, rather than a pattern of doing. Our relationship with God does (obviously) involve activity. But our work, our service, our ministry all depend on and find definition in our “being with.” Another way to put it is that what we do has meaning because we know and relate to the Father as his children. Living our inheritance as sons and daughters engenders security, peace, joy, and ultimate satisfaction even when the doing gets rough.

I recently had an experience of how relationship conditions activity. Joanne and I spent three weeks in Europe this past autumn. We took a very spontaneous approach to what we would see and where we would go. Beyond securing advance accommodations in our target cities, we made eighty percent of our plans according to what caught our fancy for the day. Rather than decisions based on Fodor’s, our agreements flowed from understanding and knowing each other. In the end, what made our trip as memorable as it still is wasn’t what we saw or did, but the fact that we shared and enjoyed each sight and sound, every taste and smell in each other’s presence. Well, except for the two times that I tried to be Greg Lemond on my rental bicycle.

I think it is sometimes difficult for us to accept identity as the foundation of our intimacy with God. I tend to prefer action to contemplation, movement to stillness, fruitfulness to abiding. Unfortunately for my predilections, the biblical picture is pretty unambiguous. When the Lord pursues Israel, he leads his people to the wilderness (Hos. 2:14), not to the ministry field.

And here’s where any discomfort or even resistance really lies. The language of God’s pursuit is extravagant, even absurd considering the object of his affections. The narrative of Hosea is that of the Faithful wooing the faithless, the Pure attracted to the unclean, the Upright in search of the wayward and fallen.

At its heart, God’s is all backward, upside-down, inside-out. It makes no earthly sense. How can we understand something like the Song of Songs with its imagery of the Divine Lover overcome by the sight of his beloved (Song 4:9, 6:5)?

Here’s the answer to our initial question of how close: It’s extremely close. The Lord is relentless in his seeking. Willing to pay an exorbitant cost to bridge the gap between him and us. Recklessly unconcerned about rejection. Undaunted by our refusals and our sinful self-protection. He wants oneness because he is One, intimacy because he is Intimate, beloved children because he is the Loving Father.

And yet he will take “no” for an answer. We may, if we so desire, opt for distance, for boundaries, for our own sense of propriety. A conditional “yes” to some amount of Jesus, some degree of fathering, some level of love and sovereign care, some influence of the Spirit. But not too much.

But as much as we say no, or maybe, or sort of, or “I’ll get back to you,” we are doing nothing less than denying our own greatest heart’s desire. We are made to eternal nearness; it is our inheritance as God’s beloved children.

So my suggestion as we begin this series on intimacy is that we open – shy prom dates as we are – with a simple “yes.” Where is he? Where can we find him seeking us? The next time we are driving in our cars, what if we turned off the sports tirades, the political rants, the mindless pop music so that we can be found by him even in our four-wheeled sanctuaries?

Or what if, the next time an evening opens up, or someone cancels a meeting, or we find ourselves drifting toward the TV set, our phone, or the internet, we literally repent and move toward the One who is our eternal destiny?

We can do these things and more, despite our fears, our indolence, our incapacity, our jadedness, if we will just ask for a little grace to turn away from our wreckage and look on his beauty.

Small steps from wherever we are to the everywhere that he is.