Fascination with God

I often wonder about what love for God means? What does it mean when I hear someone say, ‘I love Jesus’? I have come to the conclusion that a good way to describe this love in a way that as a man I can more readily relate to and quantify is to say that I am fascinated with God. I find Jesus fascinating. What is he doing? , what is he like in his character and attitude towards this situation of this person? How will he solve this, what does he think about this?
In fact much like a small child awestruck at a superhero or a football player. I find myself constantly engrossed in watching Jesus every move. I am always amazed at how kind, loving, strong, powerful, holy, clear, compassionate, honest, strong or brave he is. How is takes times to talk to those in need of counsel, heals those who are sick, encourages those who are weary, has clear goals and purposes that nothing can dissuade him from achieving.
I am just glad that I get to hang around him. I cannot think of ever wanting not to know him or be around him. It is a bit like finding that you are the object of the bullies’ attention in the playground, then just before the bully lands his first punch. I can turn to him and say pointing behind me ‘I’m with him’ one sight of Jesus on my side will deter any unwanted attention from enemies.
I owe a lot in my early Christian life to ‘the navigators’. This organisation produced many helpful tools to help learn how to meditate on Scripture. I owe a lot to a book by Campbell Mcalpine called ‘how to meditate on Scripture’. These tools helped me access scripture making it to me like reading a super hero comic book or reading rather than watching an adventure about an amazing person who always does the right thing. I would learn to chew over aspects of God’s character until I had got them so into my conception of how he is. My relationship with him was based on truth and not on my previous misconceptions. Just as a young child would then imitate his hero. I found myself wanting to be like my hero.
This fascination with God has never left me. It is the only reason when it all boils down to it that I lead a church and seek to plant other new ones. It is out of engagement with this person who still engrosses me. How he has gone through what he has in order to cleanse and forgive me amazes me, why should he do this, what was he thinking whilst he died for you and me?
We often hear the lament ‘where are the men in church life’. Women seem in the majority. Perhaps some of this in our culture might be addressed by encouraging more men to become fascinated by and with God, initially in some ways stirring their hunger as it would be by some piece of engineering or passing comment on a good football match as they watch skilful players.
This then can lead to intimacy and close relationship with God himself as a personal relationship which actually is just as much a manly trait as a womanly one.
I trust I will always be fascinated with God and close to him. One of the most fascinating things is of course for some strange reason he is fascinated with me and desire to have a close relationship to me – fascinating?