Time for the Hard Work: Intimacy of the Mind

Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons // User micagoto

Way back in July, when I had the awesome idea of making a video blog {before I realized a video blog would require that I shower and fix my hair and look decent}, I introduced you all to this revelation:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And love your neighbor as yourself. Mt. 22. 36-40

If you’ve been hanging around church culture for more than a year, you know by now that this is the Greatest Commandment, thus named by the young lawyer who asked Jesus the question.

Also, seemingly, the Impossible Commandment.

Jesus might have named it, The Summary Commandment for he said, “All the Law and Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

When he said “hang,” was he using it metaphorically, or literally? Because somedays, I feel like I do a lovely job of hanging myself out to dry on this. Sometimes I live by the motto: “Shield you heart, silence your soul, worry your mind, and self-protect your body. And love yourself because you have a lot of healing to do and others are hard to trust.”

Contextually, I think ‘hang’ translates into ‘depends.’ We can lean into God, for everything about grace leads us to this place of intimacy.

So it was in this passage that God unfolded the concept of intimacy. As I struggled through a dry and lonely season in marriage, He took me to this scripture and started the conversation like this:

Intimacy = heart + soul + mind + body

heart + soul + mind + body = all of you

Love with all of you and you will experience intimacy.

Loving God with my whole self was a safe place to start. And soon, it seemed plausible that I could take that intimacy with God and allow it to overflow into my marriage. It was a showering, a run-off, of grace.

And the first place it ran was through my mind. So today, we start the journey of healing our thoughts.

Monsters in My Memories

I was still a single mom and new in my radical life change when I realized sex didn’t have to be part of every dating relationship. Someone would love me before it. Someone would stick around without it.

I decided to test this hypothesis the very afternoon I realized it. When I arrived back at my apartment from classes, my current boyfriend was waiting for me. I started a very heartfelt conversation and shared how I needed to be done sharing my body with people. My body and soul were connected and I needed to learn this connection before giving it away.

After I said my piece, I stepped into my bedroom to take off my sunglasses and rinse my face. I had only finished when he threw me onto my bed. With my arms pinned above my head and my legs anchored by his knee, he lowered his face to mine. I tried to fight, but he was stronger, so I thrashed and yelled. My thoughts were racing. What was he doing? Where was this headed? I felt trapped and he wasn’t letting go.

And as I fought, he remained calm. “Marian,” he said, “You have issues. I’m not going to let you go until you release the things that are holding you back.”

I yelled obscenities at this pastor’s son while he held me there–on my own bed–trying to will me to heal by his own strength.

I don’t know how long it took for him to let go and leave, but I never saw him again.

Yet the effect of his actions remained with me for years. Never would I put myself in a situation where I felt trapped like that. Never would I invite someone into my thoughts on sex again.

He had evoked a fight or flight response in my sexuality.

The Effect

Within a year, I had met and married my husband. True to form, I had used sex early in marriage as a way to secure the relationship. But things started deteriorating quickly. We had been married for only three months when I physically started to shut down.

That shut down initiated in my thought life.

During the day, I would fixate on the reasons my husband wasn’t worthy of my vulnerability. When we fought, I felt unsafe, and so I self-protected. The times we did experience each other as husband and wife, I was flooded with old memories. Faces would flash in the darkness. Horrific memories came undone and I felt I was drowning there in the night.

I couldn’t control my thought life. I was unable to bind the monstrous memories. And as a result, intimacy felt completely out of my reach.

First Steps in Mindful Intimacy

Several years later, when the Lord started talking to me about intimacy, he started in my thought life.

Share your thoughts and fears about sex with your husband. 

So I did. I spared Nathan a lot of the more grotesque details (after all, I don’t want to transfer those faces and memories to him!). But I did articulate some of the lies I had believed. I did share the fight & flight feelings that overwhelmed me when I felt trapped or unable to break free during sex. I shared with him what I wanted, and how those desires were so much different than what we were experiencing in our marriage at the moment.

Take those dark memories and faces and invite Me into them. 

So I did. When old memories resurfaced at the most vulnerable moments with my husband, I took them to the Lord. I’d silently pray that He’d take that memory and make it bearable–that He’d empower me to stay present and connected and open to my husband.

Forgive those men. Forgive yourself. 

I realized these memories would forever take residence in my mind until I offered them–others and myself–up to God’s grace.

It was active surrender. A constant letting go.

And it was hard.

But slowly, each of those memories moved out. I was no longer ruled by yesterday.

Quote Isabelle Holland // Graphic Flickr Creative Commons user BK // Photo Flickr Creative Commons Natesh Ramasamy

It was a couple years later when I discovered the most beautiful passage regarding intimacy of the mind.

For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him. But we have the mind of Christ. 1 Cor. 2.16

Who has known the mind of the Lord to instruct Him? No one.

But He invites us into intimacy with Him intellectually, thoughtfully, intentionally. And to prove His desire for an intimate thought life, He gifts us the mind and wisdom of Jesus.

Intimacy of the mind starts with the realization that your thought life is no longer ruled by the darkness.