How to Be Intimate With God

There are a number of sides to the heroine, Ruthe Veer, but I think the most prominent and the key one to the whole plot, is her intimacy with God. That's right, to put it bluntly, this is a high school grad who has already formed a habit of having running conversations with God about anything and everything in her daily life.

She has a passion to share this precious intimate friendship with others, and help them to get a similar relationship with the Lord themselves. It is this that gets her into some unusual adventures, and that determines how she will get through them.

Ruthe is modelled very much on the idealist girl I was in high school, and just after that, when I started working in the city as a telephone operator. I will try to set aside the fact that I feel like I'm sharing very private secrets. I was hoping the book would introduce this concept to readers. sort of like a puppeteer hiding behind a screen and letting the puppet do the talking for the puppeteer.

In the opening scene Ruthe receives a phone call, asking her to rush to the deathbed of her new friend's mother. She dashes off without explaining to her family. On the way Ruthe recalls how she meet that new friend Muriel just weeks earlier.

QUOTE:
"I've never been at a deathbed before," Ruthe worried. "I was not really at Grandpa's last year. Not right when he died. What will the rest of the O'Briens think, me barging in like this?"

Swiftly her thoughts went into a soundless but high-charged dialogue with God, a habit developed in her lonely preteen years. What will I do, Lord? I'm only that mousy bookworm who reads too much and is scared of strangers. Just look at what I've got myself into now!
END OF QUOTE.

Ruthe had been driving up and down some seedy streets of the city, after a shift as a telephone operator. Her bleeding heart was aching for all the hurting people in that unattractive part of the city, and she was sure someone was in great need of her Best Friend and the kind of relationship she had with Him. But she had to overcome her timidity and country ignorance.

QUOTE:
"Dear God!" she moaned now, as she brushed her damp hands on the pink lace and gripped the wheel tighter, unaware that her foot pressed down as she thought of Muriel and her mother, waiting. You did a miraculous thing the night You directed me to Muriel. You even put words in my mouth. Do it again! Please Lord! I cannot turn around now! Ple-as-e. I've promised.

"Will you shut up!" Ruthe cried out. "The Lord God Almighty is with me. If He wants me to go in there He'll give me the courage."
END OF QUOTE.

Finally, Ruthe does have the courage to go into the disco-house, and immediately she is presented with a girl that needs to be rescued out of there.

This is only the first such scene. Throughout the book, Ruthe keeps stumbling into situations that are over her level of experience, so she cries out to God, and He steps in with wise thoughts, intuitive impressions and her recall of appropriate Bible verses.

You may have heard sermons in which you are admonished to walk and talk with the Lord, and trust in Him and not lean on your own understanding, but have you ever watched someone do that? Most people do not share their thoughts so readily, especially their private panic prayers. In this book, however, you get to follow a shy young woman around with a passion for the hurting and needy, and you can learn from her example how to have intimacy with God in your ordinary details.

Many people love the old gospel song, "In the Garden." Some perhaps for the garden imagery, but I'm sure there are lots of people who wish they could have an intimate friendship with the Lord Jesus, and be able to ask questions, or for direction in a sudden crisis, and really feel that the Lord was present and giving such counsel. I always loved that song for it described my walk and talk with the Lord. I like to picture our relationship as a walk and talk in a lovely garden.

Let me be quick to add, that I am not so presumptuous as to say that God speaks aloud or orally to me, or that I His voice the way some insane people do when they have murdered someone.

I have memorized hundreds of Scriptures and studied the Bible well enough to have a good grasp on the character and general mind of God. From there on, I often use my imagination to personalize some instruction so that I can feel God said that, not just to the human race in general, but to me specifically. Goodness! What are our pastors telling us in their sermons if it is not that we should personalize and accept by faith the promises we find in the Bible?

What's more, as I've read up on the theology of God's speaking to us, I learned that He is a Spirit and those who would connect with Him, must do so on a spiritual plane. Each of us has been created with a spirit, and it is this that is intended for us to use to worship God, and to listen for His personal words to us. So then, if I, or my novel's heroine, Ruthe, take that teaching literally, we (or anyone!) can be as honest and direct within our thoughts to God as if He were walking at our side in a garden. By the same token, if we know the Bible well, and understand God's will and ways with His people, it is not that hard to guess and even to know what He would have us do in a certain type of situation. This is not putting any unusual words in His mouth, or to lift ourselves up as if we have special prophecies for others.

In fact, whether we know it or not, when we exercise faith in God, or worship Him and pray to Him, we are doing those things with the spirit portion of our being, although spirit, soul and body and closely entwined. Our soul is our personality, and our body is the physical connecting point that expresses so others can see what is happening in our spirit.

Some Christians, even preachers, try to discourage this kind of intimacy with God, saying that it brings God down to our plane. Ruthe, and I, have several answers to that.

One. Isn't that what God did when He came to earth as Jesus, the Son of man? God wants very much to connect with us! Just as a doting Daddy gets down on the floor to talk with his toddler on her level, without losing his dignity as a man, I might add, so God is not embarrassed or too lofty to come to come to us if we cry out earnestly for help and fellowship.

Two. So then, how close do you feel you are to God? What do you do when you are in a crisis situation and have no clue what to do next? Where is your God then? You are short-changing yourself, if you receive Christ only as your Saviour but not as the loving Lord of Your life. You are grieving Him, if you won't invite Him in to every area of your life.

Three. Learn to worship God, and hold Him in the highest regard possible. He is the One True God, perfect and flawless, and everlasting, and yet - He has invited us to come reason together with him, and talk our sins over with Him, with the promise that He will wash them away. Ruthe's many times of feeling so very lonely and helpless convinced her she could do nothing in her strength, but if she would abide in Him, and He and His Word in her - these all led to her precious intimacy with God. Knowing that, she believed she could do whatever He might ask, and He would provide the right timing and all the resources. This is all quite Biblical.

Still, there are folks who fear they will become fanatics.

I tell you, I am rather to be envied instead of maligned, and I will cling to the Lord all the more, whenever anyone gives me a hard time!

Many times I've thought, and said too, that if it were not for my intimate relationship with Christ Jesus, I would be a mental basket case in some Psych ward in an institution, and someone would have a government salary just to look after me. I would have cracked up long ago if I had not had Him to cling to!

Once I fully understood this I was determined to show such an intimate walking, talking lifestyle to others, and what better way than to use a novel to demonstrate what this really looks like in an ordinary life. This is the whole point of my novel, Ruthe's Secret Roses. It has some sub-plots, true enough, but that's the main plot, and I'm not ashamed of it.

If you long for a closer walk with God, for a chance to see what intimacy with God really feels like, then Ruthe's Secret Roses is a book you ought to read.

Let's get back to how this shows in the life of Ruthe.

Her private devotional and prayer life causes her to love her Lord more and more, and to wish others could know Him, so she drives around after her shifts as a telephone operator, looking for someone in need. This despite her natural shyness. She even dashes up a fire escape to rescue a screaming woman from a strangler!

But again, as she prays about these experiences, Ruthe is concerned about who will be a friend and mentor to the young women she rescues, and again, she steps in with a desire to help, praying on-the-fly as it were, for help to know what actions to take, what to say. Guess what. God does step in and helps her!

It happens again and again, and her circle of friends who look to her for encouragement and answers to their questions grows until her life is very full!

Ruthe shows some amazing maturity and grace in getting these young women organized into a business, and a trio of young men starting another one, and in helping them to apply this lifestyle of walking and talking with the Lord, or intimacy with God, into their own lives.

Yet, the book lets us peek into the various layers of her life between all these exciting friendships to see how gradually she comes to see that she has a problem she has been turning a blind eye to. Busyness keeps her from dealing with it right away, but as is God's way, it begins to become a big issue, and finally it comes to a head. Ruthe has to face the fact that her life of secrecy is not what God wants for her. He never beats her over the head with this issue, but gently brings it to her attention, until finally she resolves to face and deal with it - no matter what the cost.

When she reaches that point, Ruthe discovers that God has another wonderfully creative answer for her dilemma!

However, by this point this book is full and it is time to build a bridge to the next volume in the series. (Which is presently still in the works).

It is very easy to get you hands on this book, Ruthe's Secret Roses (in eBook format).

You can go directly to it's page on the BookLocker site where it is available as a softcover paperback and will be on it's way to you within 48 hours of your order. It is also available as a PDF download, so that you can be reading in a matter of minutes. (Mind you, it is a good-sized book of 467 pages, if you want to print it out to read away from your computer).

You may also wish to first read the first eight chapters for free on this site.