Today I’m beginning with the first email correspondence Jay and I had on December 13, 2003.  In the book, Not Left Behind:  Going Back for the Offended, the pages are 11-15.  My main purposes for going through the book, as stated in last week’s writing, are to look for specifically how Jay “lived” the revelations of God’s Love and Relationships from God.  In addition to that, I’m particularly interested in how Jay spoke into my life as a spiritual parent and how the Lord moved through him and between us. I believe, for me, the Lord has put this in my heart for spiritual children He is preparing for me. Perhaps you share that interest.

I’ll make comments – in present time – in this red color.  In the correspondence what I wrote is italicized, and Jay’s writing is in regular format.

Jay and I had once discussed how much fun it would be to go back to our early communication and talk about our first impressions.  Well, Jay, this is for you!  :-)

Lisa

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12/16/03

Lisa wrote to the list:

Well, I now know one thing to NOT do when you’re a Deida newbie working on changing your relationship dynamics.  You DO NOT talk about why your sex life has not worked in the past.  That’s like shooting yourself in the foot to see if it hurts.  YIKES!  The truth is, it’s all BS anyway – all the “reasons” that kept us from intimacy.  It’s really about good old-fashioned fear, I believe.  I’m becoming convinced that this DD (David Deida) work is on an energetic level and talking isn’t.  So for now I’m going to focus on a lot more non-verbal stuff – moaning, gazing, rubbing, pulling come to mind.

Lisa

12/18/03

Dear Lisa,

I don’t know if or when I might ever send this response to what you have written here. Right now my common sense tells me that I should watch and learn for a while in order to get a better idea of where people are coming from on this list. But your paragraph above touched on, at least, three aspects relating to the possibility of or conditions for spiritual intimacy.

First off, WHOA!!!  Who is this?

(I think it’s important to note that his focus is spiritual intimacy.  That emphasis and focus was consistent throughout all of our communication and relationship.  That was important to me, because otherwise it could just be creepy.)

I would say therefore, that this is in some sense a journal entry, except that writing to a journal falls too far short of what is possible when writing to a person.

This really begins to show Jay’s heart.  That resonated with the Spirit in me.

Perhaps I can begin by confessing a few givens, the perceptions/realities out of which I write. At 65 years of age, I am convinced that the deepest longing of every human heart is for intimacy, and the greatest fear is the fear of rejection.

That was a direct hit into my Spirit.  He (and the Lord) definitely got my attention!

In some sense the garbage of past experience lies beneath both the hope and the fear. I assume your talking about your sex life related to the one, and expressed fear hardly needs further comment. The “BS” is the garbage.

I know nothing about this “DD work” having only just arrived here from another source of exploration, so I have nothing to contribute from a “DD” perspective. Rather I have come to the exploration of intimacy from a Biblical perspective.

Truthfully, at this point my heart sank a bit.  If you remember from what I posted last week, I had received a word from God that I would meet an older man who would become very important to me. I was already sensing it might be this man.  And he’s talking Bible.  My first thought was, “oh no!  I don’t want to become religious!”  Like I said, I did not really know the Lord at this point, and I was not interested in “going to church”.  (I’ve since learned and believe that there is tremendous warfare against the Bible and against Jesus.  I experienced it myself in that, even believing in Jesus and giving my heart to Him, for a while I still had difficulty saying His name.)  But there was something about the tone of what he was saying that caused me to pause and open to the possibility.  It all sounded like truth to me so far.  And intimate.  That really spoke to me.

 The door of entry from a Biblical perspective is that, in the beginning God made them male and female in His image. Genesis Chapter 1, verse 27.  In Ephesians Chapter 5, verses 31 and 32, the door is opened further where the possibility of spiritual intimacy is concerned: “For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. (This is a quotation from Genesis Chapter 2, verse 24. There it immediately goes on to say: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.” verse 25.) This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church.”

In other words, sex is a parable.

Wow!!! What??  Let’s read that again…  Is that in the BIBLE??  (Of course, I’m already starting to look up words.  I think I know what a parable is, but let’s just look to make sure…

By that, I am not suggesting that sex cannot be fulfilling for its own sake, rather, I’m saying that sex at its best is only a picture of a greater intimacy, a spiritual intimacy. That the parable is a picture of Christ and the church does not mean that there is no longer any horizontal outworking of intimacy, because there most certainly is. The church spoken of in Ephesians is composed of many people who are intimate with each other because of intimacy with Him. At least, from a Biblical perspective, this is the way it is supposed to work.

I had NEVER heart of this before!  And what is a “horizontal outworking of intimacy”?  What does that mean??

John Chapter 17, verse 21 says, “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.”

This is what Jesus prayed for?  How does that happen?  What does it look like?

At this point I cannot proceed further without first asking your forgiveness for what may have been represented to you as “church.”

Bingo! I’m really intrigued now. Who is this guy?

The first time Jesus was introduced to humanity, it was said of Him, “Behold the lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world.” John 1:29. To make this up to date in the terms we are using here, Jesus was announced as the garbage man, the one who takes away all the “BS”. In other words, before anything else is possible where intimacy is concerned the “BS” must first be removed.

In years previous, I had spent 7 years in therapy – twice a week – to try to remove the garbage.  Little did I know that Jesus could remove it in the blink of an eye.

Actually, in its popular usage, “BS” is the very opposite of intimacy, it is false rather than true. For that reason I would like to suggest “garbage” as a more helpful description of the problem or obstacle to intimacy.

Without trying to elaborate a complete theology of garbage removal,

You’ve got to love his choice of words!..…

I would for the present share with you, that all of us need to find a place to put our garbage. We are not very good at trash compacting, because when the pressure is on, the garbage sooner or later leaks out, and ruins intimacy.

(Boy, don’t I know this!)

Putting the garbage in the wrong place only messes up everything. They call it “littering,” and it really should be against the law.

… And his sense of humor!  :-D

Being in denial about our garbage is not very smart, because sooner or later everyone knows that we all have garbage.

There are places in all of us where we have never been, and the problem is that you can’t get there alone, because if you went there alone it would not be the same place as it would be if you took someone else with you.

Okay… this is it!!  Jay, you had me at “Hello”!

Garbage is what keeps us from going there. We need a place to put the garbage. Jesus is the only one who can take away the garbage and leave everything clean.

Beautiful!

This to say, alone or with others, none of us can go to spiritually intimate places without taking Him with us.

This is exactly what I needed to hear at this time in my life.  I was trying to do it alone, and could not remove the garbage.

There is no way around it/Him. If I am correct, that sex is a parable, and that the point of the parable is Christ and the church, then not to get the point is to be left hung up on the plumbing. Where intimacy is concerned, the reality is spiritual, not plumbing. By this, I’m not saying that the plumbing cannot be part of the intimacy, only that the intimacy available to the plumbing is very limited.

I don’t think I got the full impact of this until later, but I had already concluded in my life that my heart’s desire was for intimacy, and no clue how to do that. What Jay is saying here is so important to have a clue of what the Lord is after.

An aspect of the sexual parable where both the Bible, and the creation is concerned is the matter of circumcision.

Circumcision?  Where did that come from?

From the Bible we discover that the circumcision of the flesh is only a picture of the cutting off of a greater barrier to intimacy/sensitivity, the cutting off of our cluelessness, the cluelessness of our flesh, Colossians 2:11. Common sense, and sexual awareness will tell you, that circumcision should precede intimacy. As it is with the intimacy of the flesh, so must it be with spiritual intimacy. From a Biblical perspective, uncircumcised flesh is part of the garbage. Sooner or later it gets in the way of spiritual intimacy. When it does, the consequences are deadly, even worse than “shooting yourself in the foot.”

It took some time to unpack all of this, but very important to understand and submit to the Lord before spiritual intimacy… before engaging in Relationships from God.

Finally, your conclusion to abandon the verbal in favor of “moaning, gazing, rubbing, and pulling”, raises another very important, if completely ignored, Biblical point. In the Greek, there are four loves that the Bible speaks about. More than likely you have heard of three of them; “agape”, “phileo”, and “eros”. I’m also guessing that, but for the first, you know how they differ, so I won’t go into that here except to say, that The Bible uses “agape” for love, both before and after the crucifixion. The meaning of agape, however, was changed by the crucifixion. The greatest agape anyone knew about before the crucifixion was an agape that might possibly lay its life down for a friend. With the crucifixion a new agape was revealed, one that is willing to lay its life down for enemies. 1 John 3:16, and Romans 5:10.

This is the first reference to what Jay saw in his revelation of “God’s Love”.  He will give testimony to that revelation later.

The fourth Greek word for love found in the Bible is “storge”. You will find it in three places; Romans 1:31, Romans 12:10, and 2 Timothy 3:3.

This is a love that has to do with, “moaning, gazing, rubbing, and pulling”. Storge is the love of a mother for her infant. It is translated, “natural affection.” It is natural to animals including birds, and it is natural to humans or, at least it used to be. It is communicated by look, and tone, and touch. It is the first awareness in new life that it might possibly be of value. When it is not there, the result is dysfunction. In fact, it is already evidence of dysfunction when it’s missing. I should add that the other natural affections, phileo, and eros, are also communicated by look and tone and touch. One result of the dysfunction due to a storge deficit is the attempt to compensate with misplaced eros.

Yep! Been there, done that. Absolutely not interested in going down THAT path again!

While value or being valued can be communicated by look, and tone, and touch, so much more meaning can be communicated with words. In either case, the garbage must be removed or, at least, be properly disposed of as it is uncovered in the experience of intimacy.

Wow! Okay… All that he has written is quite a mouthful.  I know I read and reread all of it several times. 

Writing this was Jay as a Lover in Training at his best.  He listened to what I was saying, responded to all that I said as well as to what the Lord put on his heart, and represented the Lord in a way that encouraged me to “go there”.  It doesn’t get any better than this!

There is certainly much more that could be said on the subject from a Biblical perspective, but perhaps it is best for now to limit my response to the several points you touched on in your email.

As a fellow “newbie”, I have just reread the rules, and saw that I can send this to you in private rather than via the whole list. I hope you will not be offended by my doing so. I sincerely mean all that I have said above, and know by study and experience that it is true.

Sincerely,

Jay

One thing that I had always had was a heart for elders.  I also have a great deal of respect for someone who believes whole heartedly in something.  That this “something” was of such significance was astounding to me. And that he took the time and risk to write to me all of this.  I was fluttering inside… definitely the Spirit was “lit” in me.  And yet, I met this guy on the web!  Caution seemed prudent. 

More next week.

Lisa