A Free VIP Ticket to the Father’s Heart

Today, I was out late at a restaurant with coworkers following our company’s autumn event. When I finally excused myself from the dinner table (where the Lord had blessed me with an outstanding venison dish), I still had to walk around half a mile back to my car. Naturally, I used the solitude of the late of night to converse with the Lord on my way back to the car. Somehow, we eventually arrived at the topic of communion, which has been something the Lord had allowed me to experience more frequently in the past couple of weeks.

I want to clarify here that the kind of “communion” I am referring to is not “communion” as in the practice of the Eucharist, but a much more profound experience of closeness with God. Spiritual intimacy with the One Who Knows you better than you yourself. This crazy moment when I fall into His Light as He pulls me in, its blinding radiance penetrating every single cell of my body, filling every part of me and transforming me from the inside out, both spiritually and physically. A moment of complete one-ness with my Maker, my Creator. Where His Supernatural Presence envelops me, permeates me, and all I wish to do, all I desire, is to lose myself in Him, dissolve in Him. Where all I want to be is Him, the Him in me He made me to be. Where our reality completely ceases to be, and the only reality that remains is His very Essence, Him. Only Him.

But whoever is united with the Lord is one with Him in the Spirit.

1 Corinthians 6:17 (NIV)

An utterly overwhelming and breath-taking experience, every single time. An incredible Gift, which so far He has bestowed upon me only in moments of His Choosing. A door for me to step through into His Light that only He has the key for, and He decides when to open it, and when not.

Then, in the middle of our conversation, He suddenly says, “From now on, you are allowed to come into My Light whenever you want.” I was dumbfounded. Did He just—? My spiritual senses told me that oh yes, He did. I scrambled for words as my thoughts were racing. ‘Whenever I want’, that means any time, any place. It means that He gives me not just the choice, but even more, lets me be in control. How crazy is that?! Can I even meet such a great responsibility? After all, I could choose to initiate it right here, right now, but—no. No, no. Communion with Him is extremely intimate to me. Sacred. A rite that, just like sexual intercourse, should only happen in private and behind closed doors. And I will treat it as such. I will not desecrate something so Pure, so Holy, so True.

His tender Voice envelops me in His Love and Adoration for me as He reassures me, “See? In the past, you wouldn’t have been able to hold this responsibility yet. Now you are ready.” Oh…wow. Despite the worrying thoughts floating around in my head, I know deep in my heart that He Speaks the Truth.

And therefore, I believe It.

God’s desire to connect with you

It is yet another powerful reminder to me just how much God yearns to reconnect with us the way He always meant for us to. In all honesty, “yearn” is by far not sufficient enough to describe the incredible desire God has for every single one of us; as if He couldn’t live without us and we couldn’t without Him…which we truly don’t. For us, it is a matter of life and death, and our True Life we can only find in Him by returning to the One Who Spoke us into being. He knows this all too well, and He won’t hold back anything in His Pursuit to drive us back to Him.

But personally experiencing this adds another level of realization previously unattainable. It is such a stark reality shift to us of two in our world clashing concepts being conflated in a supernatural singularity: Unsurpassable power, might and authority, mingled with self-sacrificial selflessness that will give everything, even itself.

Especially itself.

Fellowship with God isn’t an exclusive VIP club where only specially earned rights allow you to get past the bouncer. God doesn’t have a full agenda that doesn’t leave room for your trivial, worldly problems. He’s never too busy, too exhausted, too tired for you. Any time you need Him, He is a full 100% there for you, ready to give you all that you need and more. Ready to give you all and every part of Himself in a longing and passionate desire to receive you back into Himself, your Origin, and thereby completing you in ways that the world will never be able to. He is the only jigsaw piece that fits perfectly, as if it had always been part of you… Because He Is.

God is always there to give you all that you need. This doesn’t mean that He will fulfill all your wishes, because what you want isn’t always what you need. I know from my own experience that this can be extremely frustrating and even hurting at times. I have had many times where I had wished for a spiritual, emotional closeness with Him and received nothing.

But even when He says no, God doesn’t leave you hanging. He promises that one day, you will understand His decision, and when you do it will only draw you even closer to Him. I know now that if God had always fulfilled my wish for communion with Him at every moment I did, it would have made me emotionally dependent on it, and eventually the habituation effect would have caused it to lose its specialness and sanctity for me. He didn’t want that—not, because it would take away the pleasure He experiences when His children return to Him, but because He knew that it would destroy something for me that would take away a part of my identity in Him. He said no to protect me.

I know how it feels when your prayers seem to fall on silent ears. But I promise you, He is still listening. He is still waiting. And He will show it all to you when you have matured enough and ready for it.

He has done it for me. He will do it for you, too.

“My Prayer is not for them alone. I Pray also for those who will believe in Me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as You Are in Me and I Am in You. May they also be in Us so that the world may believe that You have Sent Me. I have Given them the glory that You Gave me, that they may be one as We Are One—I in them and You in Me—so that they may be brought to complete unity.
Jesus in John 17:20-23a (NIV)