Marinating in God's Love For Us

Hearing from God isn't a matter of the intellect. Instead, God's words are something for us to dwell in.

Jun 01, 2025

In Tattoos on the Heart, Father Gregory Boyle writes that "Perhaps we should all marinate in the intimacy of God."

I've seen the value of this in my own life.

I've dealt with a lot of shame in my life. By shame I mean what Dr. Brené Brown calls “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” I spent years—perhaps decades—feeling unworthy, abandoned, and like God screwed up when He made me and made me somehow defective. At times in my past, I felt this feeling so acutely that I didn't want to live on this planet anymore.

A huge part of what changed for me was developing a relationship with God. I asked God how He saw me, and He called me his cherished son whom he loves with an everlasting love.

But interestingly, the words alone didn't do a lot to shift my feeling of shame. Hearing how God saw me and loved me, after years of hating myself, was wonderful, but also sort of tenuous. I heard God's words, and felt the truth of them, but that alone only really moved me at the level of my intellect.

But something else that I did with God moved me at a deeper level. Something else has helped me to gradually replace the inner turmoil of my shame with God's peace.

What changed was that, rather than merely hearing God's words and moving on with my day, I let myself marinate in them. I lay down for the night and simply spent time with God, feeling His presence and His love for me. I felt Him wake me up in the middle of the night just to be with me, and in so doing felt his deep and abiding joy in me.

And in the course of feeling that, my sense of myself started to shift. I started to see myself as worthy of love and belonging, of being made in God's own image; not because He told me that I was, but because He spent hours upon hours showing me that I was.

I've seen the same shift in my fear. My wife and I are both looking for jobs right now, and everything sort of feels like it's up in the air. Everything feels tumultuous. But lately, in the tumult, I've been able to find some piece of God's peace.

What helped? It actually wasn't any specific words that God spoke to me. I've been asking God for months what He wants me to know about this job search, and I always hear the same thing back: "Relax, my cherished son; I've got you." I get the strong sense, when I pray, that God has the perfect opportunity in mind for me.

But that alone hasn't actually helped much. The words are wonderful, but they feel like a flimsy shield against the torrent of my fear and shame. They feel too tenuous for my soul to really hold on to.

Instead of words, what gave me real peace was a prayer session a couple of days ago. I felt God showing me a metaphor. I was ziplining, and I was between platforms (jobs), and I had a choice: I could spend the interim clutching the zipline in white-knuckled terror, or I could relax and sink into the harness, trust it to carry my weight, and simply enjoy the view and the feel of the wind whooshing past my cheeks.

And then, over the course of an hour or so, I felt the steadiness and sureness of God's love for me. I felt His protection, which is a heck of a lot more powerful than simply being told—even by the divine being—that His protection exists.

Now, when I'm praying or writing or simply driving in my car, I'll consciously choose to feel the safety of the harness that God has around me, and the strength of the rope that's bearing my weight as I zipline towards my next job. Feeling these things—marinating in God's protective love for me—has done a lot more than just hearing on an intellectual level that God's got me.

I think sometimes in the West, we can get too focused on intellectual knowledge. We can see ourselves, in theologian James K.A. Smith's memorable phrase, as merely "brains-on-a-stick." But if we seek God merely in the realm of the intellect, then I think we'll struggle to receive all the healing and peace that He wants to give us.

The truth is that we are experiential beings. If we want to experience the full measure of God's blessings, we have to really let ourselves marinate in them. If we want to let go of our shame and see ourselves the way that He sees us, then we have to marinate in how He sees us. If we want to let go of our fear and know that He's got us, then we have to really let ourselves marinate in His infinite love for us and His power and willingness to protect us.

In this way, I think of our relationship with God as just like any other relationship. If a child wants to know that their father loves them, it's not enough to hear "I love you," sometimes. Instead, the child has to spend hours, days, weeks overall marinating in that love. If we want to build a loving romantic relationship, then it's not enough to send a few texts now and then describing our feelings. Instead, we need to spend hours, days, weeks overall having wonderful experiences and building cherished memories with our significant other. It is those hours, days, weeks, and ultimately years that form the basis of a strong and healthy relationship, and the same is true of our time with God.

If the idea of marinating in intimacy with God is new to you, try this. Point your attention at the divine being and ask Him if He loves you (I love this question for two reasons: God will always answer, and the answer is always yes). And then, as you hear that answer—and it may come in many different forms, but I believe that it will always bring a feeling of peace to something deep in your soul—don't just accept it as another piece of intellectual knowledge and then go on with your day. Instead, carve out some time and just marinate in it.

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