Last week , I received a facebook message from my friend Daphne, "Ruth, where is your blog?" She and my friend Wendy have been asking me to write down my dialogue with God. For the past three years (or more, depending on when you start counting) I have been having a conversation with God. Actually, it is more of a courtship, which includes both conversation and shared experiences. You see, three years ago, I told God that if I really looked at my heart, I would have to say that I didn't really love Him. I was serving Him and trying to love Him, but really, I was just plain afraid of Him. At that point, He told me I needed to fall in love with Him.

Falling in love with God happens in just the same way as falling in love with a person. I don't think I realized this at first, but God is a person, or three persons in one. So to fall in love with Him, you spend time together, talking or being silent together, sharing hopes and dreams, playing together, working on a project together or on separate projects side by side, sitting quietly together, walking hand in hand, dancing with each other. I have discovered that you can do all of these things with God.

I remember when I was single and becoming friends with a group of guys, a significant part of my falling in love with my future husband is that of them all, he was the one most interested in my hopes and dreams. The same has been true of God. For a long time, I had the mistaken idea that my hopes and dreams were essentially bad because my heart was "deceitfully wicked above all things." So, when I would talk with God, I would try to share a cleaned up version of my heart. To put it humorously, God and I broke up over this issue. I kept talking to God, telling Him my nice clean thoughts and ideas, but He stopped answering. I was very lonely during that time. I didn't hear His voice again until I finally told Him the truth. Then I found out to my surprise that He didn't consider my hopes and dreams to be bad! He was interested in them, loved them, in fact! It did take a few more years to convince me of that. Notice that I am only now writing them down!

Another significant part of dating and falling in love is getting to know the other person. God has encouraged me to ask Him questions, even the dreaded why question. To really get to know someone, you can't just know what they do, you have to understand why. There is, in fact, a difference between a why of complaint and a why of interest. God wants us to know Him. For some reason, this was easier for me to believe than that God wanted to know me. From reading the book of Job, I learned that it was the one who asked God questions who said He knew God better at the end. My questions are there in my heart, if I don't ask them, they seem to fester and turn into bitterness and resentment. Better to ask. God has shared some pretty amazing things in response.

So now, with Daphne and Wendy encouraging me, I am beginning a blog. This blog will be my story of my courtship with God, but it won't be chronological. I don't think in chronology. I think in relationship, in how that connects to this, and what this means in context of that. I love conversations, because conversation is a series of thoughts related to one another which weave together into a beautiful picture. My conversations with God have become a rich tapestry I am welcoming you to view.