Searching for Intimacy {Part I}

I have fallen and come up short, stumbled in darkness and came face to face with brick walls in an effort to find intimacy. I have been searching for intimacy; no, not love, but intimacy. If I were searching for love, I would have found it. Love found in friendships and family and even in wagging tails and slobbering tongues; musty, wet, fur. Love found in material things and passionate hobbies and words. There can be love - but it was all surface level love, conditional,  unable to fulfill fully - I was looking for something deeper.

There is a desire in each of us to connect. A desire to become as one, a longing that precedes words. The moment when Tarzan lifted his hand and Jane's palm connected. After a lifetime of living as that one difference in his world, he found his place. He found his connection. He found where he belonged.

I lifted my heart in the attempt to find something else that would come and fit perfectly.

In Biology, we learn about enzyme-substrate complexes. An enzyme has an active site with a 3-dimensional shape that is specific to a substrate. Only a substrate with a shape that complements the shape of the active site can fit and bind and form products.

In Biology, we also learn about non-competitive inhibitors. An enzyme also has a site away from the active site, called an allosteric site. When a molecule with a shape that complements the allosteric sites shape comes and binds to it, the shape of the enzyme changes and the substrate that used to be able to fit into the active site can no longer fit.

We are made for intimacy for God. There is something in our hearts, a shape of emptiness that can only be fulfilled by the perfect fit of His Love. But we go after other things that contain whispers of that love. It's not what we need. It can't fulfill us. When we bind ourselves to it, our understanding becomes distorted and our heart cannot fully receive what we were meant to receive.

I searched high and low for the longest of times. Places I should have never been. I scraped my knees and tore at my elbows and broke my heart, but forgot to turn to the One who first placed that desire in me. Instead I turned my back and tried to water my soul, cause it to bloom, with the dregs of the world. Yet I was never truly satisfied, and so I kept going. Binge eating on love. Vomiting it back out, left my heart feeling sicker. Aching.

I was helpless.

He found me.