Ewwww gross! Intimacy! You can’t say that in church! How nasty! I hope that wasn’t your reaction to my title, but it may have been, and I won’t lie; I do make these titles to get your attention.
Whenever I say intimate people usually think sex, being married, and maybe chick flicks, specifically The Notebook comes to mind. This is really too bad because none of those things are the intimacy I care to talk about. I am not married nor do I presently have a girlfriend (so yes ladies I am available… just kidding) and as such I don’t have a physically intimate relationship, nor do I plan to until I am married. I don’t want this to be a blog about sex or adultery or lust because those topics have long since gotten old to most people so Ill stop here and say that this is about intimacy between friends. As a side note I’ll just say that physical intimacy is (obviously) intimate but in my minimal (and entirely regretted) experience it was even more performance based than real life and as such is untruthful and irrelevant to this.
Finally getting to the point intimacy is fantastic! I have a dear friend named Ben Fader, he is a curly haired theology student from Sea-Tac and his girlfriend’s (along with many others’) favorite word to describe him is, SASSY! He is a fantastic man and a dear friend. The other night Ben and I played “love drums,” a term I coined on the spot that night for drumming to bring God glory and tell him we love him. We played for probably fifteen maybe twenty minutes, we didn’t stop the whole time, we never lost time, and only four human words were said that whole; “let’s bring it down.” It was a grand old time and I think God provided a little soundproofing to the room we were in because it was one thirty in the morning and we were very, very loud and not one person complained, even though some people heard us down the hill.
The reason I bring up Ben Fader is that we have hung out five times by my count and never for more than an hour or two. Yet I consider Ben among my closest friends because we have a remarkable intimacy.
This is where some macho guys would shout, “GAY” and get really uncomfortable. However, I don’t see anything gay about exceptional openness and transparency due to a mutual feeling of comfort and understanding. Ben knows almost nothing about my history. He knows I’m from Lake Stevens, he knows I have had two real girlfriends, and he knows I am a youth pastor and a musician. Yet I have many other friends who know much more about me, more of my life story and more of how I react to things yet in spite of this they don’t see my heart and soul like Ben does. I don’t know why God established this between Ben and I but I wish more people could know one another like we do with as little time together as we have had. I know that to some degree this doesn't happen due to fear of people seeing who we are, and I spent a lot of time in my last blog talking about that so I won’t go too in depth here but I do want to share two relevant stories.
A week or so ago I was apparently sitting at a largely female dominated table at the SPU cafeteria. Some guys from my floor and girls from my sister floor were sitting one table over and apparently were spying on me. One guy in particular, big blonde and beautiful Collin, saw me being me and saw that some of the girls I was with were pretty entertained by it. At this point he said something along the lines of, “man, if I made half the crazy noises and said half the stupid things Kenny does people would think I was crazy!” I take that as nothing short of a compliment because quite frankly it means I pull off the role of Kendrick Barnes pretty well.
Today my friend Christa the highly convivial (I used a thesaurus for that one) art major from my sister floor told me a story that is quite contrary to mine. She said she was in one of her classes and was acting a little wild; as she said, “a bit too much like her self.” She didn’t really say what she did but apparently afterward some people basically shut her down for whatever it was. Hearing this did little short of break my heart, though I didn’t say it at the time. What I did tell her was that there is no such thing as being you too much and that I would whole-heartedly encourage her to be herself all the time in everyway, especially in front of me.
This is where I suppose I have to come back to Ben and I and how this all ties together. Our intimacy is born from the knowledge that there is absolutely no judgment in our relationship and that it is all love. With Ben I am more confident than I am with most people. This is also aided by putting God in the middle of us and praying together however, I also need to clarify something here. I cannot say that I am always, invariably myself. While I encourage everyone to be themselves and I always do my best to be me, when it comes down to it I am still human and still have fear of what “they will think.”
Last night I was thinking about condemnation and other social unpleasantries and I began to feel some confidence dropping and began to think, well maybe I need to chill out and be a little less… In the middle of those thoughts God said, “no you don’t, I like you just how you are.” Yes he said like, not love.
The reason he said like not love is this; we often see God’s love for us like we see our family’s love for us and that is that they love us despite our faults, however this is not what John 3:16 says. John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son that who so ever believes in him shall not perish…” You have probably heard this before and maybe your thought right now is great, what of it? In this verse the Greek word phileo is used for love. Phileo is the term for brotherly love or the kind of our love that we feel for our friends. So lets look at this verse again. John 3:16 “For God so [desired to be you friend] that he sent his only begotten son [to die for you]…” God who knows you better than anyone (whether you like it or not) wants to be your friend! How much does that rock? God, who is the only one with a legitimate claim that he is better than us, who can see all our faults, but still wants to be our friend. How do we respond to this?
Like I said last week, we often judge people for who they are. I would so prefer it if we could kill this habit and become who we are, because there are NO pretty masks in this world. This starts with transparency with the people around us who we know (or maybe hope) won’t judge us. Our best friends, our family members, and our significant others because if we can’t be transparent with them then how can we ever become intimate with them. Again, I will point my finger at myself here. I didn’t tell my parents about my biggest regret in life until two years after it happened, and wish I’d told them sooner.
I hope we can all learn to be intimate with one another because it is amazing, especially when you hardly know the person. This starts with putting judgment behind us and looking forward to start becoming who we are. All of this is difficult, just like most things are when it comes to following God, but it is worth it, and it is best while done holding God’s hand along the way.
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