INTIMATELY INTIMATE

Intimacy, communion, fellowship...How many times have you heard these words at church, in magazines or sometimes in social circles? Have you ever wondered what they mean to you?

In Genesis3:16 God said to Eve, you will always want to please your husband and he’ll lord over you. As women we have been designed to crave intimacy with the most “important” man in our lives. So as per design most of us will search, hunt or even beg for that intimacy from men. When we are young our father and older brothers are the centre of our lives, we follow them around hug and kiss them every chance we get, be at their beckoning because we were designed to yearn for that intimacy. Unfortunately not all women have the luxury of fathers and older brothers, so we reach out to anything resembling a man around us, yearning for that male intimacy that we believe will make everything alright.

Sadly some of the men we serve and fuss over do not reciprocate the love and attention we give; they abuse and take advantage of our yearning to serve and be intimate with them. Some men do give us the intimacy though we later learn that, their intimacy is not quite it. Some of us go as far as going from one man to another in search of that intimacy we so direly desire. All that is really in vain since it seems as though no man can really entirely fulfil our deep, “bottomless” pit of love or intimacy.

In John 3:16 (irony in the 3:16) God is said to love us so much that He sent His Son to take away the sin of the world. Lifting the curse he put on Adam, I believe by doing that He also lifted the curse in Genesis 3:16 over woman. I believe that means He would have the solution to our “bottomless pit” need for intimacy with man. In doing so He would be the solution to our need to serve, be loved and get intimate. How so you may ask? I believe by being the only man who can fulfil our need for intimacy, by us serving Him instead of man and Him being our Lord; in return we’d receive the intimacy- deep intimacy that only He can give. As He said to the woman in John 4:10-18, He has water that we can drink and never thirst again. We know that, that woman’s greatest need or rather thirst was intimacy: the woman went through five husbands and still could not find the intimacy she so desired.

I am not saying don’t serve or get intimate with your husband, by all means do. It is one of God’s greatest pleasures to see man and woman unite that way. Even before the curse God instructed man in Genesis 2:24 to cleave to His wife and in verse 18 He promised Him a Helper in a wife.

My point therefore is if we,  as women seek intimacy- real intimacy then, like the Samaritan Woman, we will not find it in man but in Jesus Christ who will give us so much intimacy that we would never thirst again.