I have eagerly desired....

“I have eagerly desired to share this meal with you!”

I had read that scripture verse before, but was not prepared for the first time I heard God speak it to my heart.

I had just returned from a mission trip to Israel, a prayer journey where my team and I celebrated communion every day, multiple times each day, depositing some of the bread and wine onto the land where we prayed as we traveled around Israel for 10 days.  We returned home on a Saturday, and Sunday morning in church as my husband and I prepared to take the bread and cup, I heard Daddy whisper those words.

“But God! I’ve shared this meal with you at least 20-30 times over the past week!  How can it be that you eagerly desire to meet with me today over this meal??!?”

I began to weep then as I understood that Jesus meant what he was saying to me.  He delights to enter into intimacy with me every time.  As in a marriage relationship, where a man and wife have been married for some time, they still cherish the marriage bed, never tiring of the intimacy of the marriage act, although they’ve been there so many times before.  Each time they eagerly desire to become one again.  All of that Jesus communicated to me in that one statement: I have eagerly desired…

That was over 10 years ago that Jesus spoke those words to me over the communion table, but he continues to remind me that it’s still so, and it usually brings tears each time.  “Me? You eagerly desire me?”

As I walked in the morning before work a few weeks ago he reminded me again, and I thought about the movie, Groundhog Day.  Every morning the man wakes up and goes through the same day, pursues the same woman, and stores up information on what actions and words will unlock her heart to his.  Each day he accepts the challenge to win her heart.

“It feels like the first time, every time.  I wanna spend the whole night in your eyes,” Tim McGraw sings in one of his country songs.  So God pursues his Bride, desiring to spend every night and every day at the forefront of her awareness.

Like the day I left my office and walked across the parking lot to my car and felt Daddy’s eyes on me, tangibly felt his gaze such that I turned and looking upward as if I might see him there above me.  I felt so special, like a little girl up on the stage, dancing, twirling, performing for her Daddy, and seeing his eyes on me, picking me out of a crowd of little girls dancing, his eyes only on me.  And I don’t feel his gaze every day, but I know it’s there, and I feel like he reminded me that afternoon at work that his eyes never leave me, that he’s always eagerly desiring connection with me.  There’s never a time I am lost, too soiled, too anything that makes him not want to be with me.

Isn’t that everybody’s dream?  To have someone love them that way?  To be, as Bill Johnson suggests, “the sparkle in someone’s eyes”.  The truth is every little girl or boy dancing through life gets to experience Daddy’s eyes seeking them out from the crowd, eyes only on them, eagerly desiring to be with them again and again, like the first time every time.

So I invite you into intimacy, not me, but the Father invites you.  Listen, can you hear his voice?

“I have eagerly desired to be with you!”