Archive for intimacy
Does Anyone Understand Me?
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“He just doesn’t get it!” “Why can’t she just hear what I’m saying?” “Why don’t they just say what they mean?”
Ever find it difficult to communicate your heart to someone you care about? Ever been completely misunderstood by a friend or spouse? Well, of course, at times all of us have found ourselves completely bewildered at another human’s inability to understand us and we can feel equally bewildered as we try to understand them.
Good communication is a necessary component of every significant relationship, but how often do we find ourselves scratching our heads in bewilderment or stomping our feet in frustration because someone else has totally NOT understood us or heard our hearts.
Misunderstanding. Miscommunication. Emotional responses. Sinful responses. Personal history. There is an entire array of reasons that make intimate knowing so difficult. Yet at the core level, every human longs to be truly known. To be understood. We crave the satisfaction of knowing that someone really “gets” us.
While most of us have experienced moments of this deep knowing of our hearts, this level of knowing, this intimacy, requires hard work because each of us bring all of our past and all of what we believe to be true about life, others, God, and ourselves into every exchange.
Yet despite all the frustrations that we may encounter, we were designed for intimate sharing of our hearts and lives with God and with others.
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Intimacy: It’s More than Sex
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Intimacy. We all say we want it. Books, blogs, and articles are written about it, yet achieving intimacy is much more difficult and multi-dimensional than the world tells us.
Intimacy is often framed as a physical, sexual relationship we have with another, but many sexual relationships are anything but intimate. While two physical bodies may be touching, there can be miles between the two hearts. Thoughts, feelings, secret motivations, hidden agendas, unmet needs, the list is endless.
What is intimacy really?
It began at creation. God created a man. The man, Adam, had a relationship with God where God knew Adam and Adam knew God.
Then God created a woman. The woman knew God before she knew Adam. She was in God’s presence before He brought her to Adam and Eve had her own experience of knowing God and Him knowing her.
Then God brought the man and woman together, and they knew each other (Gen. 4:1). The Hebrew word “knew” indicates much more than sexual oneness. Adam and Eve were ‘naked’ in each other’s presence (Gen. 2:25), and there was no shame in their mutual nakedness.
Intimacy is really a deep knowing of another. It is not confined to marriages or other relationships which involve sex. It is much more than sex.
Intimacy is when we bring all of ourselves to another within the appropriate boundaries of that relationship. A married couple’s intimacy should include sexual intimacy, whereas a parent-child relationship has different boundaries, a friend-friend relationship has yet another set of appropriate boundaries.
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Honest Anger
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A few years ago, I invited a counselor friend of mine, Susi Harbour, to come to our ladies’ retreat and administer a personality test to our ladies. I had already taken it once and thought it would be fun and useful for the ladies of our church to know more about themselves and how they ticked. Susi suggested adding an anger inventory to the activity. “Okay, sure,” I said. I suppose I didn’t quite get the purpose of the whole thing, but I figured it’d be interesting.
As I sat at the table with other Christian women leaders, I was surprised that they were such fire balls! They apparently had lots of anger! I, on the other hand, scored “anger avoidance” as my style of dealing with anger. I didn’t really think that was such a bad thing. I mean, after all, I was a godly woman. I was extremely patient. I almost never spoke sharply to anyone and had lots of grace for others. Well, as it turns out, I had a lot to learn about how to deal with my anger and what healthy anger was.
Just a short time later, my world crashed. I was drawn into a whirlwind of pain, gossip, betrayal, fear, threats, and just plain lack of people skills and Christian love, and my anger style kicked into overdrive!
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Living Intentionally
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Live intentionally… by your sacred design…and experience what happens. These words on my friend’s blog* stopped me.
What does it mean for us to live intentionally?
How much of your 2010 was intentional?
When I reflect upon 2010, I recall some very intentional significant moments. I also realize that there were moments, hours, days, and maybe even weeks that just happened. And such is the nature of our lives too often.
Yesterday, I did something intentional. I took a step to reconnect in an authentic way with someone I love. It was something I had thought about doing many times, yet I had just not done it. There were several really good reasons. It involved risk. Vulnerability. Intimacy (not just for marriages… “In-to-me-see”).
My intentional step gave me inner peace.
As I reflected on this today, I began to think of the definition of repentance. It seems we can often relegate the idea of repentance to whatever “big” sins we have committed or what we view others as having done to us. Yet today I thought of how repentance is a necessary component of our lives and relationships for we often fail each other, whether intentionally or through neglect or the lack of purposefulness.
Although we can never be assured or guaranteed that another person will respond to our repentance with grace and acceptance, we can find inner peace by our intentional actions.
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My BFF
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If I asked you to define the word “friend”, you would probably come up with a list of terms to describe a person you are on good terms with, someone you are attached to with positive feelings, etc.
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