The need for emotional literacy- to recognize, identify, experience, communicate and respond to feelings in a way that facilitates connectedness is a human need….. connectedness to self, others, and God. Humans have also been given an extraordinary accompanying, inherent capability to do so that is much more than animal instinct for physical survival alone. This need and capability for connectedness is not the exclusive domain of women and girls. Men have the same need and capability. God has given us the capability for life-long, satisfying emotional connectedness…for spiritual and emotional intimacy. … He has also created in us the NEED…and made Himself available as the primary PROVISION to meet that need, along with our families and friends and the capacity for deep individual sentience to be content and reflective in and of ourselves, too.
One aspect of REAL love, godly love, agape love is caring enough to help others “connect”…. to help them feel emotionally safe, welcomed, comfortable, edified and encouraged. Too many people are not getting that kind of love. What they are getting is a counterfeit cultural definition of ” love” that is all about one person being expected to meet the physical and emotional needs of another.
While the capability for connectedness is natural and inherent, being in the image of God, the skills for making connections have to be developed and taught through family and cultural mechanisms – institutions like churches, schools, sports teams and youth groups based on other common interests (music, vocational goals, skills, talents, etc.)
Such institutional incubators of connectedness skills have been undermined and lost their moral authority. There is no longer a consensus on what standards are to be used to define how that connectedness is facilitated. As Judges 21:25 describes another such time in human history: “Each man did what was right in his own eyes.” It was a dark and evil time in human history….and it set the stage for the “fullness of time” into which God came in the Incarnate Life of Jesus Christ.
Some things never change. Human nature, left to its self, will operate out of personal self interest, desire, and need, focus on the connection only with oneself and neglect the need of others and the desire of God to be connected to his own creation.
This is the way to death…spiritual death, psychological death and far to often, physical death, too.
This past part was shared by a friend who discovered this through personal experience.
If you try to build intimacy with another person before you have done the difficult work of getting whole. all your relationships will be incomplete because no person can do that.
John Wesley said it this way: “The world never made anyone happy, and it is certain it never will. But God will.”
CBB -10/3/20
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