I believe in a personal God. And I mean real personal. As personal as you can get! Everything He has created in the physical realm is a symbol, a typification and illustration of some greater spiritual truth behind it, (as David Berg taught). He has created parents to illustrate His parenthood toward us, His beloved (however wayward) children, and He has even created the intimate loving realtionship betwen a woman and a man - marriage - to illustrate the ideal realtionship between Christ and His Bride.
What does that mean? Basically: No secrets! There is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed, as it is written, anyway, so why kid yourself & pretend you can hide anything from Him? And if you realize you can't, or that it's senseless to try, you might as well communicate with Him about the innermost matters of your heart.
I wouldn't be wasting my breath & any potential reader's time going on about this forever if I hadn't found out first hand that this really works, just as I found out that tiger balm works to prevent sore throats or artichoke to prevent liver trouble. Comunication with God prevents soul trouble, & it can prevent a whole lot of other trouble as well, & there's an endless amount of things you can learn in the course of your conversations with Him.
One of the latest prescriptions I got from "Dr. J." was along the lines of intensified communication within a marriage relationship. Did you know that you can "tune in" to a person? The Rock band "The Who" sang about it on their best ever album "Who's Next" from '71, "Gettin' In Tune."
I grew up on that album, which had been my dad's, & I always wondered what it was about that song that got me. 30 years later my Creator tells me that it's because it talks about a concept that really works. You can get in tune with a person close to you, similar to the way you can get in tune with God & His Holy Spirit. The only difference being that God's Spirit will always be ready & willing to respond positively to your CQs & attempts to make a connection with Him (or Her? - We'll get into that some other time...), but another human may not always... not even your wife.
Basically, it's much the same as praying for someone, except that it's not you coming with a specific petition for that person, but it's more like meditative prayer, sort of like the boy whom the pastor overheard citing the alphabet on his knees. When asked what he was doing, the boy responded, he didn't know what to pray & figured God was able to put the letters together Himself.
Tuning in to the one you love is having meditative prayer for them. You use God's Spirit to help you find a common "ground" or wavelength for you and that person you care for: you draw them closer to your heart in the spirit, closer to God's heart, and thus you draw closer to them, obtain a greater understanding of them, better able to relate to them, and do what Paul (in the Bible) called "becoming one." He wrote, in his first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 9, verses 19-22, that he became "unto the Jews as unto a Jew,... to the weak...as weak" and "all things to all men" so that he could get them saved. In modern English we call this relating to someone and we've been doing it, some to greater extent than others. "Walk A Mile In My Shoes" is a song we often sing, and another terminology we can use for it. But what I've been learning this week, is that we can even take this further, if we're interested enough, & really delve into a person's soul (and much more effectively so with the help of God's Spirit than most psychiatrists with their heady analyzes & money-oriented motivations) & get to know them better & better & better.
In other words, even if you think you got stuck in some kind of dead end street with your relationship or marriage, don't throw in the towel prematurely, because God has promised to make a way where there is no way.
Recently I found out that the origins of the word "respect" come from the latin "respicere," which means to look again. Often we think we have a person we're familiar with all figured out & there's nothing new and exciting to find out about them. Well, I found out that God may often tell us, "look again!" To really respect a person, means to look again, to have a closer look & give them a 2nd chance before you tuck them deeply into your mental drawer labeled "boring" or "unattractive," "too old," "undesirable" or "know all about them there is to know."
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