Richard Dawson, 6 April 2016

I wrote last week about life having it’s heart in relationship with God but what does this mean? How can one relate to someone who, for intents and purposes seems not to be there?! This begs the question about the nature of relationship. Most would say that someone has to actually be there for one to have a relationship with them, by which they mean one has to be able to touch them and see them. But in this age of social media and digital communication we can all see that this is just not true. I came across someone having an internet romance 20 years ago. In my first parish I officiated at the wedding of a man whose first wife had left him for a man she’d never met but had fallen in love with over the internet! Now I certainly don’t encourage this but it is clearly possible to form a strong relationship without someone being there. We do it all the time in a more cursory fashion on the phone and by email.
The two major contributors to growing a relationship are 1.) intimacy—the development of closeness and 2.) communication. Communication is major contributor to intimacy and so how we communicate is vital. The Bible is full of encouragement to communicate with God… ‘Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.’ (Jer 33:3) Prayer is, of course the major medium of communication with God and it is as we pray that we find ourselves drawing closer to God. The Bible also assures us that God longs to ‘draw close’ to us. In other words to develop an intimate relationship with us. James assures us that… ‘Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.’ (James 4) So far from ‘appearance’ being vital to a relationship we discover that we can have a true relationship with God even though He does not ‘appear’ as a human.