Though people may sometimes point to certain ones and/or gender as being more relationship-oriented, we all realize how untrained we are about “relationship” when it applies to encountering our awesome Creator. Our most intimate and revealing relationships reflect this. How we live one is how we live the other. There is an awkwardness and ignorance in all of us in relationship especially as it comes to being fully revealed and known. How do we live a relationship? If we are given an experience we want to repeat, and we as humans will naturally turn that thing into categories, principles, habits, techniques, methods, steps, patterns…EVERYTHING but actually encountering the Living Person and living before this Person. This Person is the Risen Jesus.

Francis Schaeffer asked, “How do we then live?” A heartfelt question! Is there the in-between when we aren’t in a Christian discipline of worship, prayer, reading? What do we do then? “God, who has called into fellowship with His Son Jesus Christ our Lord…” (1 Cor 1:9) We are called into that! How do we do it? How do we DO fellowship with the Son? How do we walk a full day before Him and into the next?

For those of us who know we are prone to veer off from close proximity and anything that starts to feel intimate with the unknown, Henry Blackaby in EXPERIENCING GOD continually reminds us that various communications from God don’t lead us to encountering Him, they ARE encountering Him!

A major Christian historic verse: “The just shall live by faith” (Gal 3:11). It’s a different way of living. Duties and appointments are strung together within the enveloping Relationship. They are mere notes on the page, but the melody is already there. It has been provided. Upon the hollows of His being, our notes are being written as we live them.

Boredom, dullness, stagnation are excluded when we are walking on top of the boundless depths of Relationship. “God Who has called you into fellowship…is FAITHFUL” (1 Cor 1:9). In His faithfulness, we WILL enter in! —————————