Intimacy with God first

INTIMACY is the ideal condition in all our relationships. But we have to be intimate with God first before we can be intimate with everybody and everything else in the proper way.

This need for intimacy is, of course, a necessary consequence of being a person and not just a thing. We are meant to enter into relationships because that is how we are designed. We are, in fact, meant to live in communion with God and with everybody.

It’s when we get intimate that we achieve the best condition in our relationships. As I wrote in a previous article some time ago, the simple reason is that we need it. It is in our intimacy where we can really see ourselves and others as we truly are, in our rawest and unvarnished selves. Intimacy is where the most fundamental expressions of our humanity are made, where we become aware of our personhood, and where our identity is established and defined.

It’s where we know and uphold our uniqueness and distinctiveness. At the same time, it’s where our need to relate ourselves to God and to others is felt primarily and properly. It’s so important and indispensable that without it, we certainly would compromise or at least damage and harm our personhood and humanity, and our relationships.

We have to understand that we have to exert conscious effort to develop our proper sense of intimacy. We should not allow it to develop simply by chance or by some random initiatives. We have to be very serious about it, always coming up with concrete plans and strategies to put it in place and to keep it going.

And the reason for this is that especially today, with so many things grabbing our attention, we always have the tendency to treat God and others in a very casual way, if at all. And so our relationships will most likely remain in the superficial level and are mainly driven by self-serving motivations and not by love, which is the proper spirit that should animate our relationships.

We have to do everything to grow in our intimacy with God everyday. This should be a constant concern of ours. This is the most ideal condition that we can and should be in, and we just have to figure out how it can be achieved.

To be sure, this is no pipe dream. This is not only possible and feasible. It is first of all God’s will and he has given us everything so that we can truly get intimate with him, and be privy to his will and ways.

Let’s remember that the world gives us a lot of options to do what we want to do. And though we are given an autonomy to do what we want, and all of them can be moral, valid and legitimate, we should try our best to choose the one that we are convinced is what God wants us to do in a given moment.

This is to make sure that what we are doing is always in synch with God’s will and ways. Our life is always a life with God. It is supposed to be the time of our corresponding to God’s continuing work of creating and redeeming us until we become to be what he likes us to be—his image and likeness, his children in Christ.

That is why we always need a period of serious, more direct and personal conversations with him in our mental prayers or meditations and other spiritual exercises so that that ideal intimate relation with him can be established, nourished and maintained amid the drama of life.

With that very intimate relationship with him, we would know how to react and behave in every situation of our life, as well as how to shape and direct our life properly.