Getting intimate with God.

Do you ever watch old couples in a restaurant? I do. I think they’re teaching me how to pray.

I've had so many great dates with God -- everything all whistles and bells and chemistry, with God showing me things about life and myself that no one has ever shown me before. That's part of the problem. It's hard to accept the slow dates, the ones without much talk – just lots of silence and stillness, forks scraping plates, knives cutting pork chops. Chewing.

I used to fear those moments. Where has all the intensity gone? All the great talk? I couldn't accept the stillness. So I’d succumb to my thoughts, checking them and responding to them like they were text messages pinging on a mobile phone I hadn't shut off.

Now I'm learning to enjoy the sound of chewing not as an interlude between more important sounds, but as the sound of intimacy itself.