The hostess at the bridal shower handed each guest a slip of paper and a pen. 

The game was to see how well we knew the bride.

What color are her eyes?

What is her favorite ice cream?

When did she attend her first concert?

We called out answers and I had a few lucky guesses, but only best friends knew the most obscure details about the bride to be. Of course, if you asked them why they love her, it wouldn’t be because of ice cream and eye color. They’d say it’s because she is a good listener and a devoted friend and once stayed with them all night during surgery.

And although someone less familiar with her, like me, could take these friends’ word for it, I wouldn’t know those qualities firsthand.

Firsthand. 

Can we know God that way? 

Know God beyond the stories we’ve been told?

As a spiritual director and elder in a new monastic community called Northumbria, Roy Searle has a long history of friendship with God. But when he was a young pastor, he was busy doing things for God. Something was missing, and he couldn’t put his finger on it until one day his young son came into his office and said, ​“I just want to be with you, Dad.” It captured Roy’s heart’s cry — a deep longing to move from knowing about and serving God to really connecting with the Father at the level of loving companionship. 

Friendship grows through shared experiences, and Jesus is always inviting us into them. He wants us to remember the time we felt his presence and peace with us all night during surgery, or the time when we were stuck in a quandary and felt the Spirit suddenly illuminate what to do next. These kinds of experiences confirm and personalize the truths about Jesus we’ve gleaned from his other friends. 

Both are needed — secondhand and firsthand knowledge of God. One helps me desire, expect, and understand a relationship with God; the other incorporates information about God into my life with God , wherever I am and whatever I am doing in the present moment — which, as Dallas Willard said, is the only place anyone can actually be with God. 

When we get to know Christ firsthand, experiences of his closeness may be hard to describe with anything more than how it made us feel. But then isn’t love always that way? Love is more than feelings, of course, but it isn’t less.

The more time we spend with God, the more we notice and appreciate. And the more we listen to what others who know God say about him, the more we understand what we’ve experienced and catch a glimpse of possibilities for communion that draw us further up and further in.