All I know is that God Is Love

In the late summer of 2001, I had a life-changing six week visitation from the Holy Spirit. What totally shocked me was how rich with affection His Presence was. He flowed with the most beautiful emotions I could imagine. Emotions like warm regard, gentle patience, happy kindness, lightness of heart, restful peace, fun playfulness, and wild unflagging LOVE!!

All those emotions swirled in and around and through me day after day for the six full weeks He opened my senses to Him. It was like He was living emotion, living beautiful emotion, of which we in this world have only dull shadows.

One of the first things the Holy Spirit asked during this long visit was for me to take communion and remember with Him the death of Jesus – His body that was broken and His blood that was spilled.

One might wonder why this beautiful, loving God would want to have anything to do with remembering a slow gruesome death through the cruelty of Roman crucifixion. And one might wonder why those of the Christian faith seem to regard this horrible death as such a foundational event.

And so I’ll tell you a story, maybe a story like you’ve never heard before.

A Simplistic Story As I Understand It

Long ago God created a perfect world. Our Creator, deliciously good Himself, declared his creation good. It was harmonious with all the beautiful, loving, happy emotions I spoke of above. Harmony, peace, and joy were defining, as they were defining of the Creator Himself.

The Creator chose a plot of ground on this new earth and planted a garden. It was a wonderful garden – without weeds, pest, blight, or drought.

Creator God then created a man and a woman who reflected His very image and gave them the garden as their home. He dearly loved the man and woman He had created and spent time with them and gave them joyful, satisfying, meaningful work. There was no death, no decay and no unpleasantness. They flourished.

Their occupation was to serve and keep the garden in which they lived. (Keep it from what, I wonder? Maybe we’ll see.) But that wasn’t all. The plan was that, as they procreated and spread across the earth, they were to have dominion over the entire earth and everything in it.

Now, dominion isn’t the same thing as domination. Domination has to do with power over someone or something. But dominion is rulership, and Jesus Himself explained that the role of the leader is to humbly serve (Matthew 23:11).

The Choice

When God planted this garden, He took a great and calculated risk. He placed a Choice in the garden. Why would He do this? Possibly because without a choice these people He loved could never truly be His friends. With no choice they could only be programmed, dominated, or controlled. And programming, domination, and control aren’t within the nature of God.

The essence of the Choice was to honor their Creator’s instructions and be content with the loveliness they lived in and with the satisfying relationship they had with their Creator, or to violate the Creator’s wishes and seek beyond for what might lay outside. He warned them that outside their present reality was death.

My imagination kicks in here. I can picture them in this loveliness wondering what exotic things lay in that realm God said was off limits. Was it better than this? Were they missing out on something they might desire? With no paradigm for anything but harmony, beauty, love, and a world bursting with life, they didn’t know what to expect. And being limited to their own reality, which was defined by the beauty of Who God Is, they could not access any real data for making this decision. They either had to trust this great friend and loving Creator, or they could explore beyond His margins.

The day came that the man and the woman made their Choice, and they chose to explore the reality that was outside this loveliness God had entrusted to them. And there truly was a reality outside of it. It was a reality outside of God Himself.

All the things that were outside the beautiful nature of God were in that reality. I have no clue why it existed. That’s not part of this story. But it was real and it was filled with all the things that were dissonant to the nature of God.

Dissonance

And so humanity chose. It wasn’t God who chose; it was our kind who made the Choice. And in their choosing, they ushered in much that was dissonant to the beautiful nature of God: stress, discontent, broken relationships, shame, injury, disease, death, ingratitude, boredom, resistance, gossip, craving, and yes, even what we call outright evil (such as torturing people to death through crucifixion). Our entire world system was corrupted with dissonance. And since that day, each of our hearts were born tasting dissonance.

Our destiny was now death – physical death, which we know, and spiritual death, which involves ultimately being forever separated from all the beauty that is God.

Thankfully, this did not make us void of good – His image was still the source of our existence. But we were no longer defined by the lovely nature of God. We now had far more in common with what exists outside of God than with what exists inside Him. The innocence of our relationship with Him was disturbed and we were no longer harmonious with Who He Is.

But our Creator never lost interest in us. He never stopped speaking to us, interacting with us, loving us, or providing for us. He wasn’t intimidated or repelled by us. Even at our dirtiest and most dissonant, He never turned away. Throughout the scriptures we see Him interacting lovingly with dissonant people (for example, as in Genesis 4:6). Jesus Himself confirmed this as He explained the heart of the Most High, explaining that God is kind even to those who are ungrateful and evil (Luke 6:35).

He continually poured out His grace and mercy into this alternate, undesirable realm in which we were trapped – this realm that He had so longed to protect us from.

Our end destiny of being forever separated from our delightful Creator was one we had no ability to overcome. And our determined efforts to eradicate dissonance and achieve the paradise we had lost merely resulted in human achievement that took us further and further from the exquisite nature of Creator God, and further and further from an affectionate harmony with Him.

We might have longed for the kind of relationship with God that still somehow echoed in the far recesses of the past, but we were destined to live in a reality that was not His. And we couldn’t fix this with our choices or our behaviors. Our destiny was immutable. There was no win. We were infected with the dissonance that existed outside of God and try as we might, we couldn’t entirely eradicate it and win back to our place of innocence.

Some Want It This Way

Keep in mind that some today consciously prefer living in this present reality. Some might want the beauty, the satisfying work, the kindnesses, and the security of the original creation. But they don’t want to be limited by what is in the nature of Creator God.

They want the freedom to explore beyond Him. They value knowing what is beyond His edges and indulging in what is opposite to who He is. They have no desire to return to the brilliant, rich but naive innocence of earliest humanity.

I have known people who applaud the woman who was involved in making this Choice, exalting her as Goddess and Savior of humanity. They believe this story I’m telling. They just interpret it differently, crediting her with carrying humanity into a new age of enlightenment and rescuing us from the oppressive world of Yahweh. They gladly accept the consequences as worth the freedom from Creator God’s boundaries.

Enter The Plan

But God never stopped loving us. He was terribly concerned about our long-term destiny of spiritual death – being sundered forever from Him and from all that was of Him. He didn’t want this for any of us (2 Peter 3:9).

Creator God didn’t have any tidy options at this point. We had chosen and now we were all infected with death and dissonance (Romans 5:14). He could not simply ignore the dissonance or pretend that we could pick things up where we left off before the Choice. That would be like welcoming the dissonance and death into Himself, which was impossible. Besides, it seems clear to me that even if somehow He was able to return us to the world and the reality He originally created, we wouldn’t stay there; we’d just once again recreate our dissonant world through our choices and inclinations.

He did have a plan though. But it was exceedingly messy, hugely costly, and, most likely, acutely offensive and entirely incomprehensible to those He was trying to rescue.

This messy, costly, offensive, and incomprehensible plan revolved around the concept of Innocent Blood. It seems to me that it works something like this. Each of us carries a spiritual debt to death – one we have no means at all to pay (Romans 5:14, 6:23). The beauty of the gift of Innocent Blood is that if something perfect and innocent is killed in our place, the blood of perfect innocence can be used to pay our spiritual debt to death that would separate us forever from all that is our Creator. At least temporarily. And it covers over our dissonance as well. (Hebrews 9:22).

It’s worth noting that human sacrifice was meaningless: there was no longer any perfect, innocent human blood of any age; it all carried its own debt to death (Romans 5:14). We could die and it would appease nothing. It would merely fulfill the requisite death sentence against us.

So perfect, spotless, valuable, and sometimes beloved animals were carefully chosen and, as humanely as possible, sacrificed. And it not only temporarily held at bay our own death sentence, but it also graphically reminded us of the life-and-death desperation of our personal situation. In addition, it regularly renewed our awareness that we existed in a realm outside the nature of our Creator. Desperate measures for desperate circumstances.

The animal sacrifices plugged a much needed hole, but they were just a temporary fix – and one that required a steady flow of sacrifice to pay for our ongoing dissonance. But this was just a shadow of what was to come.

The One

When the stage was finally set, God moved forward with the permanent fix. And Great Mystery entered the world.

There was One who in the beginning was with God and who also was God. Everything that was created was created through this One. This One was made flesh and lived among us. (John 1:1-14). The fullness of God was in Him (Colossians 2:9). He was entirely harmonious with God, and was in very nature God. However, He did not hold onto that, but made Himself nothing, taking the nature of a servant, and adopting the form of human flesh (Philippians 2:6-7).

And so Jesus was born. His assignment was manifold. He was to immerse himself into this broken, dissonant world, sharing in our suffering, including the suffering involved in being tempted. He wanted to better relate to our experiences and have greater compassion on us (Hebrews 2:17-18, 4:15-16). He was to reveal the Father to us (John 14:9). And most importantly, He was to be the final perfect sacrifice of Innocent Blood that would once and for all restore us to our Creator (Hebrews 10:12).

And Jesus did a wonderful work of embodying God to us. We had so lost track of who God was, forgetting in our dissonance how kind and emotionally beautiful and full of love He was. As Jesus told His disciples, “If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father” (John 14:9). Because we had forgotten. And we had made difficult, convoluted rules and unlimited demands and said they all had to be followed if we were to earn God’s regard. And we painted Him as harsh and demanding.

But Jesus showed us a far more personable portrayal of God. Scriptures say Jesus was filled with extreme joy and gladness (Hebrews 1:9). That certainly sounds like the Holy Spirit who visited me.

When His other work was accomplished, Jesus became the final sacrifice creation had been holding its breath for – the perfect, spotless sacrifice. His pristine, completely Innocent Blood was spilled out.

No one who loved God could have carried out the sacrifice. And so He further shared in our sufferings by putting Himself into the hands of cruel men (Mark 14:41) who mercilessly mocked and tortured Him, and then slowly murdered Him in public, naked and ridiculed. He was a voluntary victim of the evil that was so utterly foreign to His nature.

It was for us. Our spiritual death debt was paid once and for all. His final word as he was dying, translated “It is finished” (John 19:30), was the same word that was stamped in those days on a debt when it was paid in full.

Because of Jesus, we now have the opportunity to go forth without a destiny of spiritual death hanging over our heads. Because of Jesus, we have the opportunity to walk in restored harmony with our wonderful Creator (Romans 5:1). Because of Jesus.

I am eternally grateful.

Jesus is risen!
Gail Ruth

The living High King Jesus, the Magnificent, The Utterly Supreme One, is overwhelmingly impressive. For example, when He appeared to John the apostle, John fell down at His feet as one dead just from being in His presence (Revelation 1:17).

While this is truly an accurate portrayal of the glorified Jesus, it is not the whole story. This facet of Jesus in His glory, isolated out of context from other facets of Who He Is, makes Him sound unapproachable and untouchable — too wonderful for us to get near. Alone, it can even become a one-dimensional caricature of some distant, detached deity.

While it is wonderful to acknowledge and worship our mighty Jesus who is Supreme above all, the highly sensitive person who is a Christian often hungers also for an intimate and emotional connection to Him. Or they would if they knew it were possible. The reality is that many highly sensitive Christians find their hearts starved at church, never understanding there is a remedy. What many churches don’t understand and can’t tell them is that it is possible to have a personal heart-to-heart emotional relationship with the Jesus they worship.

At the beginning of this post I’ve attached a video of some of my Holy Spirit music. This song is in honor of my heart connection with Jesus, my High Priest.

As felt in the song, I find there are many other facets to this supreme Jesus that fill out His splendor in warm, comforting ways. They don’t reduce His magnificence; they merely add to the multi-dimensional nature of that Magnificence. For example, He is portrayed throughout the book of Hebrews as our compassionate and merciful High Priest (Hebrews 2:17). He sympathizes with our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15). And we get to come into His presence freely and openly, just as we are. In all our frankness and bluntness. No protocol, social graces, or clean-up required. (Hebrew 4:16).

I also think of Him as an elder brother. He is the one Who called His Father “Our Father” (Matthew 6:9). I see Him as the natural firstborn of the Father (John 3:16, Romans 8:29), and myself as a dearly-wanted adopted child of His Father (Romans 5:18). I love that I get to call Him brother as well as The Utterly Supreme One.

Where is He now? Scripture says He is at the right hand of the Father (Romans 8:34). But again, that’s not the whole story. Jesus promised His disciples shortly before His crucifixion, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word, and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him” (John 14:23). It just doesn’t get any better than that.

Be blessed! Gail Ruth

One thing I’ve noticed over the years of listening to lots of highly sensitive Christians: God interacts differently with highly sensitive people.

I can’t address how God talks to everyone else, but I do know that the Holy Spirit speaks tenderly to the highly sensitive person. He doesn’t holler, raise a ruckus, harangue, scold, frown disappointedly, or demand that they get their act together.

With the highly sensitive, God is a real sweet-talker.

What God’s Voice Feels Like

God speaks to the highly sensitive person in a way that feels really good. Period.

His communications are soothing. When you hear the Holy Spirit’s still small voice, your whole being melts into the truth of the message. It quickens something inside you and make you feel suddenly alive, and yet at peace, like everything’s going to be OK now.

The words create a life-giving, uplifting response. Your human spirit vibrates harmoniously to the words. Stuck places inside you dissolve effortlessly. Your mindset shifts.

Whether it’s a “sweet nothing” or a correction, God’s communications with a highly sensitive person melt tensions and elicit feelings of safety and nurture. It feels like the “Aaaaahhhh” of a perfect bubble bath after an exhausting day at work.

Learning to Hear Him

Many highly sensitive Christians don’t understand at first that the Holy Spirit talks to them this way. However, over time they are able to use this insight to differentiate His lovely voice from the babble of their wounded soul, harsh religious programming, and competing spiritual voices.

I have come to believe that God intentionally designed us sensitive ones so He would have someone on earth with whom He could share His lovely heart. Someone who would notice. And respond in kind. That heart-to-heart relationship He so cherishes.

You Are Safe With His Voice

I can assure you that if God made you sensitive, He will not violate your sensitivity.

Other people will violate it. Evil will violate it. Religion will violate it. Even you yourself might violate it. But not God.

He made you and He knows you. And He’s crazy about your sensitivity. “O God, satisfy us in the morning with Your unfailing love, so we may sing for joy to the end of our lives!” (Psalm 90:14). Blessings! Gail Ruth

Let me get one thing absolutely clear. I believe God is good. Like, really good. Yummy good. Delicious good. Maybe that’s why the Bible says, “Oh, taste and see that Yahweh is good” (Psalm 34:8).

I don’t know how you are, but when I taste something really good, I have a deeply satisfying physiological response to it, and when I taste something exceptional I am transported into emotional raptures. After all, I am a very highly sensitive person.

No less with God. You see, I’ve tasted God, and I’m here to tell you that God is so deliciously, magnificently yummy that no words in the world can do Him justice. I would have to call Him the most Beautiful Taste in the world.

Head God vs. Heart God

Sadly, for much of my life, I suffered from the phenomena of two Gods. I had the heart God and I had the head God. The heart God I’ve known since I was a small child when I could feel a beautiful Presence Who loved me and with Whom my heart was safe.

Then there was the head God they taught about in church. He was an impassive God, void of warm emotion, who disapproved of my deep emotions. Actually, He disapproved of most everything.

Although my heart longed to believe God was that lovely Presence I sensed from my heart, my heart lacked credibility in the world in which I grew up. I was taught that heads always trumped hearts, and so I doubted and lived in the confusion of having two Gods: the harsh God that I knew theologically and the beautiful God that I experienced emotionally.

As I’ve talked with many people since then, I find this is a common experience for a highly sensitive Christian in a cognitively-based church.

It All Changed For Me

In 2001, I had an overt visitation from the Holy Spirit that lasted for six weeks. It was an amazing experience outside my familiar reality. It was that same Presence, only richer and fuller and deeper and clearer and far more intense than the Presence I had previously felt outside of church.

I would never have recognized this Presence from what I had been taught at church all my life (He was too kind and not at all demanding), but when He desired to celebrate the living Jesus with me and then asked to lead me in communion to remember the suffering and death of Jesus, I came to understand this was truly the Holy Spirit of the Most High God.

And what a shock He was. How such a lighthearted, happy Being could be the Spirit of the God of the Bible was beyond my comprehension, until the Holy Spirit opened my understanding and let me see this highly emotional, good God described throughout the Bible.

Let me tell you about this One Who visited me those weeks in such intense clarity.

Let Me Describe What He Was Not

I’ll start by listing what wasn’t there with this One. There was no arrogance, harshness, expectation, agenda, control, manipulation, disapproval, nagging, impatience, distancing, judgment, demands, or finger-pointing. As the highly sensitive person especially finds these responses damaging, it was a great relief to find a total absence of them in the character of the Holy Spirit.

And Now the Good News

Instead, what struck me were the intense, pure, and beautiful emotions of this Presence. How lovely were His thoughts and intentions. Lacing throughout everything in this One was a lighthearted, happy, peaceful, warm love that was patient, attentive, fluid, and kind. So playful and light of heart. Absolute, emotionally snugly beauty.

I learned that in His eyes I was beautiful and beloved and dearly treasured. And He revealed God the Father to me as my strong, gentle, trustworthy, pure, and good-natured Papa God who is always in the best of moods in His interactions with me. The Holy Spirit taught me that because of Jesus, God receives me warmly no matter what state or mood I’m in. I’ve learned that He is the One Safe Place in all the known universe where I can relax. With Him I’m known thoroughly, accepted completely and loved warmly.

Everything I’ve learned about God is good news, especially for the sensitive Christian who is more attuned to nuances of emotion. Everything I will ever write in this site is based upon the foundational experiences I’ve had of the taste of the goodness of God. Everything I believe and everything I live hinges on His scrumptious goodness. It is my primary assumption underlying everything.

Bon Appetit!

As you continue your unique spiritual journey, I wish you your own version of spiritual Bon Appetit! And if you’re like many highly sensitive people, that can get quite experientially tasty indeed.

Blessings!

Gail Ruth

The Difficulties of Being Different

One of the complications of being a highly sensitive Christian is that most Christian teachers are not highly sensitive, and yet they’re the ones teaching and modeling for us the nitty-gritty of how to live our Christian lives.

Many highly sensitive Christians find themselves becoming increasingly neurotic as they sit under such training. It seems the harder we try to live up to these less sensitive ways of living the Christian life, the further out of reach slips the abundant life promised by Jesus (John 10:10).

Hard-wired entirely differently from less sensitive people, the highly sensitive experience the world in a way that few appreciate. In the church, highly sensitive people are rarely understood – even by themselves. Instead of sensitivity being celebrated and found valuable, as God intended, it is often disapproved as immaturity, defect, or character flaw.

Even among the teachers in the church who are highly sensitive persons, few have come to peace with their high sensitivity and many battle it as if it were an enemy.

Investing Our Sensitivities in the Heart of God

Highly sensitive people have richer senses and usually deeper emotions than their less sensitive counterparts. As highly sensitive believers, we have the potential to invest those deeper emotions and richer senses into our relationship with God, although people who don’t know about sensitivity are understandably unable to tell us that.

The highly sensitive person has an uncommon potential to develop a relational style with God that is strong with emotion – both our own and God’s – and able to sense the intangible Presence of God, emotions of God, and/or communications from God. What a joy to overtly experience the warmth of the love of God for oneself!

Enjoy Your God!

So, enjoy your high sensitivity. Enjoy your God (Psalm 9:2). Dance in His presence (Psalm 149:3). Rejoice (Phil. 4:4). Christ is your life (Col. 3:4). Rest (Heb. 4:9-10). Play (Mark 10:15). Come into His Presence with happy confidence because of Jesus (Heb. 4:16). Drink from the river of His pleasures (Psalm 36:8). Be safe in Him (Psalm 91:1). Respond (Rev. 3:20). Soak in His presence (Rev. 1:10). Thank Him (Psalm 107). Worship (Psalm 29:2). Believe (Matt. 9:28).

Be blessed.

Gail Ruth