I'm somewhat new to CF, and I sure get a lot out of the questions people post. They are often the same questions I have or have had. Here are some humbly offered musings for your deliberation, Zoidar.
There is an exhilaration in that intense experience with God that is not at all unlike falling in love. You've felt it. Science has reduced it to some chemicals in our bodies called oxytocin, and apparently we get a surge of it when we become exhilarated. Besides the infatuation that comes with falling in love, this hormone also plays a role in labor, into contractions, into breastfeeding, into bonding a woman in pain with the fragile newborn and the man that caused the pregnancy, lol, so you can see that it's a powerful influence on the human psyche, and has been shown to last roughly 18 months. Short lasting romantic "flings" usually break up about then because the exhilaration is gone. For the parent, it is a tough place to go through the "terrible twos" of childhood without this exhilaration that had supported lovingly waking up at all hours of the night to nurture the tiny child all those months before.
But there's something further that happens in the walk of love. Part of it is us. We continue to draw closer to the one we love and this time it's with deliberate intention - it's an act of will rather than the response of the magnet that we felt while under the influence of exhilaration. For the parent, we continue to develop the role we have as parent to the now demanding and increasingly independent and self-willed toddler and we begin to celebrate the separateness of our lives. With this relationship with God, we now intentionally grow into the maturity that He calls us to. It's not a dry sense of duty, because it's more a deliberate digging deeper all the time, more like the steady growth both downward, upward, and outward, that a tree goes through, maybe a tree near a source of water like Psalms 1 says.
The thing I noticed was much like being the newborn at first, with a parent who had good bonding technique, who sought to make that connection, and all I needed was my own innate responses, so it was easy and life was good. But in order to grow, it had to transition into a stage of moving from innate to deliberate responses, and in the process, I too found myself in places where I made awful mistakes. I remember the first big time that happened was early on, and when I was "caught" as it were, and had to look at what I had done, I clearly realized that was why Jesus died. And His love was and is so intense toward us that He made the way that even that would not prevent His encouraging me onward and upward. He broke the chains of that bondage so I'm not tied there anymore, and in the times I find I've erred, I go back to that place and start all over - that's why Jesus died, because of His intense love toward us.
Lately - and this has been coming for an embarrassing long number of years - I've been realizing that He actually wants us to be adults in Him - fully formed. Whew! Look at what an amazing aspiration God has for us, that we should be called His sons!
I'd agree with the former suggestions that what we do has a lot to do with how we feel about our relationship, and for good reason. In the end, there's a separation of sheep and goats, of people who did what He wanted and those who fooled themselves. So I agree fully that doing those things that we know show His love in the way that He told us are good choices for us. And I'd say that along the way, in the same way that we learn about our loved ones by listening, all the more we need to be paying attention to what it is that God is saying in the stories of the Bible, because you can see His intentions there and you can learn to apply them in life and it just works so much better that way.
I hope it's OK to use the comparisons of natural human life to a concept as lofty as our relationship with God, and I know it does fall short in some aspects, but it was what came to mind when I read your question. Seek Him and seek to understand as much as you can so that your appreciation and worship of Him grows, seek to do what it is He's intending for you. I feel sure that if you do, what grows in your life will include joy. Best to you, Zoidar.
