Firstfruits, Awareness to Intimacy

[HKHaugan]

You know, when you look outside the window and find yourself in the mountains surrounded by trees in full leaf array, a bird nesting with young in the eaves of where you’re staying, the rush of a roaring stream filled with recent rainfall and breathing the freshly strained air, there is a sense that this is more than just Creation. It makes you aware, aware that what you perceive is a brush stroke across the canvass of reality swept by a mind of infinite architectural artistry, a caring heart intentionally desiring to share its depth and a spirit shaping, molding and urging a relationship with the architect/artist, His mind, heart and Spirit. It is a gift, a personal gift, a spiritual gift and a gift invoking the mind to search its entire visible and invisible content, to feel its intensity and to share its purpose and meaning.

The universe is a fingerprint, a footprint, a mindprint, a heartprint and a spiritprint of a Being so utterly real as to make our speculation about Him but a minute thread in its overall fabric. Conceiving that He is approachable, communicable and relatable within that which He created stretches every fiber of our imagination. Yet that is the nature of the Creator, to create in order to share, to share in order to relate and to relate in order to inspire and to inspire in order to complete what He started. And to think that He wanted to make images of Himself to be creative in the same dimension, the spiritual and personal dimension, to will what He wills, to awaken in us what is available through Him. Creation is simply the environment in which we become aware of Him. Awareness is an awakening to the broad realm of personal and spiritual possibility that is shaped by His revelation of Himself in Jesus. The physical universe is a minor illustration of the major magnitude of the spiritual reality that is God.

Awareness is a doorway He gave us to navigate the infinity of existence that ultimately is Him. Speculation, imagination and conceptualization in the personal and spiritual universe only begins with awareness. I say ‘only begins’ because Jesus is the gateway to ‘the other side’ of awareness. I say ‘revelation’ because we can’t intuit what can come only from outside through revelation. That which is revealed is intentionally revealed through relationship where the Revealer use awareness of Him as a gate for faith which is that quality awareness of the Creator stimulates. Awareness is not an end, it is a beginning.

The goal of awareness is intimacy, the longing within every human heart, intimacy with God, intimacy with others and intimacy within. There is nothing more threatening to the human heart than the lack of intimacy. It is at one and the same time our deepest internal and external desire and our most frightening internal and external need. It is the objective and subjective quest of every human endeavor. Everything we do and say reflects the longing for intimacy. Mind to mind, heart to heart, spirit to spirit, there is nothing we won’t do to accomplish its reality.

When we face reality honestly, nothing less than a perfect relationship can meet its requirements. Only a perfect person can relate perfectly. Intimacy requires perfection in order for it to be realized. When we are aware of our imperfection then the gift of awareness is working towards its purpose, to have faith in God as He is revealed in Jesus the perfect person. If we can become aware of sin as the cholesterol blocking our heart’s deepest desire then we can see why Jesus went to the Cross to remove the blockage by forgiveness to restore us first to God, then to Himself and then to others.

Suffering is the lack of intimacy, sin its cause. Suffering in its physical, mental and spiritual forms is the result of not being aware of its cause that ends us in the loss or rejection of intimacy with God and others. Rejecting the cause of suffering gets us to focus on ourselves, our immediate condition and depending on ourselves to remove it. For Jesus suffering was separation from His Father, losing intimacy with His Father and for our sake the willingness to experience that loss of intimacy by dying on the Cross. He believed in His Father and loved Him so much He was willing to trust Him in His heart and went to the Cross in faith that He would rise from death. He fully exposed Himself to death’s resulting aloneness and all that meant for our sake because He knew ultimate aloneness was our worst fear. He willingly embraced that fear for us. His awareness of His Father, our lost condition and His Father’s will to restore our intimacy with Him, led Him to the Cross for our sake. His whole life was devoted to revealing His Father, His Father’s intimacy with the Son and His Father’s desire for restoring the same intimacy with us. When our awareness leads us there that is the starting gate for God’s love to begin the perfection and completion of our needs for ultimate intimacy.

Awareness is not an ‘it’ but an advance into the kingdom of intimacy, God’s presence. Because sin has infected the heart, desiring what we fear and fearing what we desire, there will always be a tension between our personal sin and the intimacy He offers. We usually think of tension as a struggle to overcome, struggle being suffering, while in reality it is the fertile field where growth of intimacy is experienced. Interpersonal tension between our heart and God’s heart, between our heart and the hearts of others and the inner tension we feel in the process, is actually us taking up our cross and not remaining static. We seek to open those doors that cause relational anxiety, resolve them and find that intimacy that comes from their resolution. Awareness of this process moves us toward personal and interpersonal depth, the desire to move into the process, vacate the fear of intimacy and bathe in its fountain.

Awareness of the person of Jesus is the beginning. Belief in Him works our mind. Trust in Him works our heart. Faith in Him motivates our spirit to act. We gladly invite and face the tension which is between pride and intimacy. Pride is the ego trip for self-protection and self-projection that sin wallows in. Intimacy begins when we drop our guard to let God in and direct the same attitude toward others. Again, this is not suffering; it’s fertilizing and growing intimacy. If we stop with awareness and see it as an end in itself we miss its purpose. The same can be said for realization, recognition, awakening, enlightenment, hope, peace and release. The end is never the self and just being aware. The end is its source, God the Son, who is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. When He is the beginning and the end we are always in the process of expectation, renewal and process. Heaven is not an end but a continuing personal and interpersonal movement. Our minds, hearts and spirits were created in His image for the intimacy He offers. Physical creation is the temporary environment for a purpose that goes well beyond anything our limited minds can conceive. When we are aware of our limitations and our limitless relationship with God then intimacy is His perfect love casting out fear and lifting us into eternity.

Now to the Psalmist who knew this intimacy from the tip of his head to the bottom of his feet in a day to day growing awareness.

“Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;
my body also will rest secure,
because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead,
nor will you let your faithful one see decay.
You make known to me the path of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence,
with eternal pleasures at your right hand (Ps.16:9-11).”