Never Fear, Always Near, Always Here

Scripture says, do not fear nor be afraid for the Lord your God, He is the One who goes with you. He will not leave you nor forsake you.

And in that promise, that reality, we get the peace and the intimacy that we all must have. Trusting these things to the Lord, knowing that we don’t have to be afraid or alone frees us to be real and vulnerable with the folks around us and that is the basis for real connection.

Why so Important?

Why is connecting so important? Why do people pay such a high price for even a moment of it? Why are people with everything but connection eventually confronted by their own misery? The answer to all these questions is the same: because God exists as a community of connected persons. We were fashioned by a God whose deepest joy is connection with Himself, a God who created us to enjoy the pleasure He enjoys by connecting supremely with Him but also with each other. To experience the joy of connection is life; to not experience it is death to our souls, death to our deepest desires, death to everything that makes us human. – Larry Crabb

Vital to our Soul

Trinitarianism teaches us that connecting is as vital to the life of our soul as blood is to physical life. When it’s missing, we are ruled by the need to get it. Sometimes we settle for too little. Sometimes we conclude we’ll never find it and become hollow people, mere shells carrying on our lives in quiet despair. – Larry Crabb

Other Than Ourselves

Connecting with others depends on using our capacity to relate for the enjoyment and enhancement of someone other than ourselves. Paul said that he struggled on behalf of others with the energy of Christ that powerfully worked in him (Col. 1:29). The life of Christ is coming out of me only when I am gladly ruled by a passion to know you, to bless you and to be known by you so that together we can enjoy fellowship with Christ and with each other. – Larry Crab

Capacities

“The capacities that distinguish us as human beings from all other creations were given to us so we could connect with each other the way the three divine persons connect. We have the capacity to enjoy the wonder of a relationship built on grace that no angel has ever personally experienced. Combine that capacity with the capacities to think, imagine, aspire, choose and feel, and you have people built for trinity-like community.” – Larry Crabb

But too often –

“I’ve got AM, FM, XM, iPod, iPhone, Internet…and we’re all closer together, just an e-mail or a text away, but we’ve all retreated into our niches, we’ve lost our cohesiveness. We’re no longer all in it together, we’re doing our own thing. And when you take a break and look up and realize no one’s around you wonder…are we better off?” – Bob Lefsetz

Connecting is Life

We were designed to connect with others. Connecting is life. Loneliness is the ultimate horror. In connecting with God, we gain life. In connecting with others, we nourish and experience that life as we freely share it. Rugged individualism, proud independence and chosen isolation violate the nature of our existence as much as trying to breathe under water. – Larry Crabb

It can be dark in there.

We each so desire to be connected, I came across this statement from Bob Lefsetz (thank you Darren) and it really tells how the world around us feels.

“It’s dark inside my mind. Do you get that feeling? That there’s a plethora of stimuli surrounding you but there’s a force field between you and the rest of the universe? That you’re locked inside your head and you can’t break out? That no one understands you and you’re dying to make a connection but it’s impossible? I feel that way all the time. My whole life is about trying to eradicate this feeling, I’m trying to make a connection.”

We can be the solution if we will.

Don’t Need to be Afraid

I love how God reveals Himself, supports and confirms what He’s saying when we’ll listen. After sharing on fear and trust yesterday, I came across this from Larry Crabb –

“The point of the whole plan is relationship, a connected community.

We can make a little headway in building that community now. If I have already been forgiven and therefore connected to a God whose Spirit pours life into me, then you pose no threat to my existence. You can reject me, hurt me and make my life pretty miserable, but you cannot destroy me. Therefore I don’t need to be afraid of you that my fear controls how I treat you.”

Actually in Us

More thought on yesterday’s post –

“When God forgives us for violating His design, He pours His life into us; and that restores our capacity to connect, first with Him, then with others. He makes us alive with the actual life of Christ. The energy with which Jesus heard and obeyed the Father, the impulses behind everything He did – His tenderness with the lame man, His indignation with the moneychangers, His patience with Philip, His red-hot scorn for the Pharisees, His love for children, His resolve to endure injustice without complaint – are in us. The impulses that energized Jesus’ life on earth are actually in us. That’s part of what it means to be alive in Christ.” – Larry Crabb

What he said.

Listening for God

Yesterday we talked about finding or making some time to get away from the noise and distraction in the world around us in order to connect more closely with God, which we know is no easy task. But what might be even more difficult is once we’ve found a time or place that’s quiet around us, to get our minds and thoughts to be still. How can we listen for what God has to say if our quiet time is filled with us speaking to Him? It’s far better to give our thoughts over to Him and listen to what He has to say than to run through a list of what’s on our mind or ask for what we want. It’s certainly okay to take our concerns to the Lord but hearing back is really good too.