intimacy, sunday

Sunday, June 28

Opening Prayer: I ask You, Lord Jesus, to develop in me, Your lover, an immeasurable urge towards You, and affection that is unbounded, a longing that is unrestrained, a fervor that throws discretion to the winds!  The more worthwhile our love for You, all the more pressing does it become.  Reason does not make it tremble, wise judgment does not tempter it. ~Richard Rolle 

Scripture: Psalm 139:1-24

Journal: What words or images in this Psalm capture your heart?  What challenges or disrupts you?  Where are you experiencing the intimacy you were made for?  What stands in the way of that?

Reflection:

 

     The story of the Sacred Romance begins not with God alone, the Author at his desk, but with God in relationship, intimacy beyond our wildest imagination, heroic intimacy.  The Trinity is at the center of the universe; perfect relationship is the heart of reality.  Think of your best moments of love or friendship or creative partnership, the best times with family or friends around the dinner table, your richest conversations, the acts of simple kindness that sometime seem like the only things that make life worth living.  Like the shimmer of sunlight on a lake, these are reflections of the love that flows from among the Trinity.  We long for intimacy because we are made in the image of perfect intimacy. (The Sacred Romance by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge)

Prayers

Closing Prayer: God, investigate my life; get all the facts firsthand.  I’m an open book to you; even from a distance, you know what I’m thinking.  You know when I leave and when I get back; I’m never out of your sight.  You know everything I’m going to say before I start the first sentence.  I look behind me and you’re there, then up ahead and you’re there, too—your reassuring presence, coming and going.  This is too much, too wonderful—I can’t take it all in!

     Is there any place I can go to avoid your Spirit?  To be out of your sight?  If I climb to the sky, you’re there!  If I go underground, you’re there!  If I flew on morning’s wings to the far western horizon, You’d find me in a minute—you’re already there waiting!  Then I said to myself, “Oh, he even sees me in the dark!  At night I’m immersed in the light!”  It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to you; night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to you.

     Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out; you formed me in my mother’s womb.
I thank you, High God—you’re breathtaking!  Body and soul, I am marvelously made!  I worship in adoration—what a creation!  You know me inside and out, you know every bone in my body; You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit, how I was sculpted from nothing into something.  Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth; all the stages of my life were spread out before you, the days of my life all prepared before I’d even lived one day.

     Your thoughts—how rare, how beautiful!  God, I’ll never comprehend them!  I couldn’t even begin to count them—any more than I could count the sand of the sea.
Oh, let me rise in the morning and live always with you!  And please, God, do away with wickedness for good!  And you murderers—out of here!—all the men and women who belittle you, God, infatuated with cheap god-imitations.  See how I hate those who hate you, God, see how I loathe all this godless arrogance; I hate it with pure, unadulterated hatred.  Your enemies are my enemies!

     Investigate my life, O God, find out everything about me; cross-examine and test me, get a clear picture of what I’m about; see for yourself whether I’ve done anything wrong—then guide me on the road to eternal life. ~The Message