Addicted to Love or is it just sex?

Church experiences can become as compulsive for some as sex can for others. Do you remember the feelings you had when you were first falling in love? Valentine’s Day got me thinking that being in love with a person and being in love with God are alike, both can become about an experience or both can deepen and become about relationship.

As the relationship deepens it often becomes less about the experiences we share and more about sharing each other in relationship. In other words, we don’t need numerous dates out on the town etc. in order to generate excitement. We are just content to be together as a couple. As the relationship progresses there is occasionally an attempt to seek experiences that allow us to return to those feelings of falling in love rather than seeking to deepen the relationship.

If we are not careful we can become addicted to the feelings and experience and not the actual relationship. We become "feeling addicts" or "experience addicts". We confuse adrenaline for passion in love, sex, and church. It is like making a relationship only about sex and not about relationship. The same thing happens with the church.

With only using feelings as our guide, we often mistake sexy for sacred. We continue to lust for feelings and expereinces when our deepest hunger is for relationship. It reminds be of being addicted to sex rather than Love. Falling in love is much more than an experience of sex. Some confuse the experience of sex with love.

Sex addicts often seek the experience that generates a feeling rather than a relationship. The addict moves from person to person to person seeking more and more of the feeling one gets from sex. LOve is more than just sex. The same thing happens in the church and with God. If we are not careful we can become addicted to an experience of God rather than a relationship with God. We can be compulsive about seeking a feeling and not an authentic healthy realtionship. We can jump from church to church to church seeking some form of emotional high while missing the deeper relationship with God.

The relationship deepens with time spent being together. Like lying with your lover without the need for words—trust and intimacy just exist in the presence of one another. It is simply being. I find that I sometimes need to just be with God and not attempt to create an experience of God to generate some feeling for me. There is often so much talk in the church about doing that we forget to be. I think God just longs to be with me. When I get where I don’t necessarily "feel" God, perhaps I don’t need to attempt to create an experience in order to feel God but rather just be still and know that God is God. Just be with God. Like a relationship, love is more than just sex. No words, no experiences, just be with God. Just simply be and allow yourself to be embraced by the Lover of your soul.