Captivating

"You are the one that overwhelms His heart with just "one glance of your eye" (Song 4:9b). You are the one He sings over with delight and longs to dance with across the mountaintops and ballroom floors (Zeph. 3:17). You are the one who takes His breath away by your beautiful heart that, against all odds, hopes in Him. Let that be true for a moment. Let it be true of you.


God want to live this life together with you, to share in your days and decisions, your desires and disappointments. He wants intimacy with you in the midst of the madness and mundane, the meetings and the memos, the laundry and lists, the carpools and conversations and projects and pain. He wants to pour His love into your heart and he longs to have you pour yours into His. He wants your deep heart, the center place within that is the truest you. He is not interested in intimacy with the woman you think you are supposed to be. He wants intimacy with the real you." (John and Stasi Eldredge, "Captivating" p. 120/121)


On the recommendation of a good friend, I have recently began reading the book Captivating, Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman's Soul. The book written by the husband and wife team of John and Stasti Eldredge is the counterpart to the book Wild at Heart, a book written for men to discover the secrets of a man's soul. (As the title explains) Today, in my morning prayer time I was reading the chapter on being romanced. If you are a woman, it is no secret to you that we all have this innate desire to be romanced and wooed. Married, single, dating, whatever your state in life is currently most woman desire to be desired and shown affection and intimacy. As a single woman, I think we often think if we could just land a date then we could feel this intimacy that we are longing for, but as I read the chapter I realized that we can achieve this intimacy by seeking out God and truly worshipping Him. As the Bible reminds us so many times, the Lord longs to romance us. He longs to touch our hearts in a deep and personal way. (Just read the Song of Songs to see how He woos each and everyone of us as the Bride of Christ.)

The quote posted above also reminded me that God doesn't want to romance us after we lose 10 lbs or once we get our prayer life in order, instead He wants to love us right now where we are. He wants to love us in the mundane parts of each of our lives. He wants to love us when our make up is a mess and our prayer life too. He wants to love us when there is unending laundry in the basement and piles of work at our desks. The Lord desires to love us through and in our imperfections. I think sometimes we are afraid to let the Lord in because we are still working on clearing out the cobwebs and the mess that sometimes lies within our hearts. Maybe there are still barricades on certain areas of our heart or perhaps the guilt of the past makes us feel unworthy of being wooed by the Greatest Lover of all time. And as we women work to clean up the mess, the Lord is standing outside the door of our hearts knocking, with his mop and bucket in hand ready and willing to come in and do the "cleaning up" for us. And if we finally stop long enough to open that door to let the Lord in, He doesn't come in and shake his head at the mess, nor does He judge, but rather He takes our hand and gets to work cleaning up. (And believe it or not, He does a much better job than we do.)

And so that is my prayer for all of you today, and myself included, that today we would open our hearts to the Lord today and allow Him to come in and romance us. That we would let Him come into even the messiest chambers of our hearts and allow Him to clean them up so that the two of you (us) can achieve that intimacy that both He and you desire.