 "End Your Long-Distance Relationship with the Lord” was originally posted on August 11, 2016, by Fr. Najim at SpiritualDirection.com. Thank you! The full text can be read at spiritualdirection.com. "As a priest, people often talk to me about their lives and their problems. Inevitably, I ask them how their relationship with God is. I can usually tell from their response if they have a long-distance relationship with the Lord. The language they use reveals that a deep, personal friendship with God is somewhat of a foreign concept. For example, they’ll say, “Well, I say my prayers at night before I go to bed,” or “I go to church,” or, my favorite, “I talk to the Big Guy in the sky; we’re tight.”
Great. Saying prayers at night and going to church is a wonderful way to deepen our relationship with God. But saying prayers at night and going to church does not necessarily mean that we have a deep, personal friendship with the Lord either. And as for “talking to the Big Guy in the sky,” that’s simply not Christian spirituality; it’s deism. In fact, therein lay the problem: too many people think God is “out there somewhere” rather than very close to them. |