To Hug.

I wrote yesterday about touch and the importance of touch in regards to love. I believe that ultimately touch, a hug or a kiss or a warm hand solidifies in our minds that there is another there that our love is applied to and there is a confirmation back at the same time of the others feelings for us.

Love also most be applied to another person to be fully realized. Yes you can love your car or love your dog but those things will not and can not ever return the emotion to you in the way you feel it for another human being. God so loved the world, that He gave His only Begotten Son. Not His only anything else but Son, another person. Even God created man so that man could have relationship with Him, walk with Him and talk with Him. Love is truly realized only when shared with another.

My seperation here, from those that I love so dearly, means that I can not then express my love for them any more then just a word from my mouth or by an action such as a card or an email. These however never reach the level as the touch, as intimacy with your wife, or a cuddle on the couch with your children. Words never replace the unquestionstionable power of our actions. So at seven thousand miles away the best I get is words. The worst I get is the longing for more.

I place this now in relation to God. The seperation that was caused by our sinful fall has placed Him in a position of longing, longing again to have relationship with us. He created us so that we may fellowship with Him, to walk with Him in the garden and yet we chose not to do this, we chose an easy alternative in disobediance to His offer of His Love. As the husand may do to His wife, this has caused the relationship to disolve.

When I came home, Catherine and I hugged for minutes there in the airport. We were able to touch again. We did not stand there and discuss how we loved each other, I did not hand her a letter stateing how I felt. I did not list out all the things that I do that proves my love, I reach my arms out and fully embraced her in a living and true expression of my love. We confirmed through connection what we feel inside.

As I saw those that were close to me I would hug them. As my brothers and sisters in Christ my heart is connected to them in this Love. I care for them deeply and in that must express to them that Love, to have the touch. God also does this for us. God in His longing and expression of His love has given us an opportunity to have the intimate relationship back with Him. It is the wife asking the husband for intimacy after years of neglect. God has given us His only son so that whomever so believes in Him shal have eternal life, relationship with God as was the orginal intenent. But more than this, just acceptance, God asks us to follow His Son, to live as His Son, to have our actions speak as a testiment to our Love so that in turn we experience with God and for God the touch that is so needed.

The Bible explains our lives with out the relationship with God as eternal death, damnation and sin. It is an emptiness that we try to fill with so many other things that can not and will not ever replace the touch of God. As in a dead relationship, ne or both people begin to fill the distance with other things to help satisfy the emptiness, pornography, drinking, another woman all in an attempt to find what is missing and never quite getting what they need. Death, seperation one in the same.

As I hugged and expressed my love for my wife and children I place in my heart that they are connected to me and I to them. As I hugged my Brothers in Christ and expressed my love for them I was connected to them and they to me. As I fully embrace and express my love to Jessus Christ then I am connected to God and He to me. No longer is there the distance, no longer to I look to fill my heart with other things. No longer do I feel the ache because I now feel the other that I love.

If you have not stopped and had a truly genuine expression of love to your spouse or children lately. If you have spent months or years on a couch across the room or with just simple expressions of your love for the other. I you truly love them then please get up and cross the room and give them a hug, give them your touch. If you you do not know the love of God, truly, where you long for His touch, where you ache to know Him more, then begin by asking Jesus Christ to be your saviour. Then begin to whole heartedly follow Christ in your deads and actions and fully expect that you will be in the presence of God. You may just find that sitting across the couch, death, from the one you truly should love has been what has left you empty and longing for more for so many years.

Lord, I pray for anyone who is in death at this time. Death of relationhip with a spouse or child, God. Anyone who is in any type of seperation from those around them that they so easily could love more fully but don't, that they step up and touch, that they accept the gift of love that God has placed within us and express it unconditionally to one another, to Him.