Commitment and Intimacy, A Quote

I am reading Nancy Groom's Risking Intimacy as I seek to further understand the whole commitment thing, and I came across this passage this morning. She says it much better and more succinctly than I do, I think...

Acknowledging dependence on God is often difficult for men and women accustomed to living self-sufficiently. Resting under the sovereign rule of a Being infinitely holy and altogether powerful demands of us both faith and humility, for admitting we desperately need God will deal a deathblow to our pride.

It is a delicate balance to achieve. On the one hand, every person must accept responsibility for his or her own choices and must be willing to pay the consequences when those choices are wrong. But when it comes to the eternal consequences of our sin against a holy God, there is nothing we can do to save ourselves. Oswald Chambers accurately observed, "we cannot earn or win anything from God; we must either receive it as a gift or do without it." The humility of receiving from God what we cannot do for ourselves is the cost of our salvation.

In a similar way, there are things we must ask for and be willing to receive from other people, especially those to whom we are most intimately connected. We must accept our innate neediness - not the unhealthy neediness of a clinging vine dependent on another person for identity or worth but the legitimate need we all have for human connectedness and love. It is the humility of needing God that opens us to repentance and grace, restoring us to fellowship with Him.

Yet the willingness to need requires much of us, for we are more accustomed to earning and accomplishing than to desiring and asking.

                                                                    -- Page 94