Finding God in Bed

My book agent is an unusual combination of business partner, coach and mother. Even though my agent is a guy, he is still like Mom because he frets about my future and hopes he can be proud of me someday if I grow up to be a successful and mature writer before he throttles me for misbehaving. I recently told my agent that I wanted to write a book titled Finding God in Bed. He replied, “Well, that would certainly be provocative,” which is agent/mother-speak for, “You have lost your ever-loving mind, and no Christian bookstore would ever carry a book like that, and you are going to be the death of me yet, and wouldn’t you feel better after a nice nap?”

But I really do want to pen a book with that title because I truly did find God in bed. A lot of people say that they find God in the beauty and wonder of nature. While I am very happy for them, I find it much more exhilarating to find God in the warm afterglow of a stupendous orgasm.

My agent would be overjoyed if I told him I was going to write a book about finding God in Yosemite National Park or the Sears tool department. But while I also see the hand of God in the wonderful complexity and beauty of nature, it also contains grizzly bears, mosquitoes and shockingly frigid water that can drown me.

If you spend too much time in the beauty and wonder of nature, you will find that nature basically wants to kill you. The lion and the lamb will one day lie down together. But until Jesus actually ushers in the kingdom, the lamb would be prudent to stay far from Simba.

Nature certainly reveals the power and creativity of God, but I don’t think it directly teaches us about the love of God. While nature is fraught with peril, I have never come remotely near death while in bed with my lovely bride. In bed, I feel warmth, love, passion, loyalty and joy.

I find it significant that when God sought to give us a powerful analogy of His relationship to us, He said the church is the “bride of Christ.” That is a staggering thought, but we are often not very staggered by it because we have not taken the time to really let it sink in.

So think about a truly wonderful time you had in bed with your wife—the hunger you felt for each other, the vulnerability of nakedness and passion, the desire to please each other and sense of contentment as you drifted off to sleep after making love.
God wants us to enjoy the very best that earthly love has to offer. He wants us to have a rich, deep, incredibly real relationship with our wives. He wants it to dawn on us that His own love for us is far richer, deeper and more passionate than the very best we have ever experienced with our mates.

Had He not been the one to invoke the image of marriage when talking about our relationships to Christ, I would have thought it far too intimate to dare to draw that comparison. It’s one thing to talk about a kindly king adopting wretched orphans, but it’s a much deeper metaphor to talk about a marriage with God.

All analogies break down and so does the analogy of a marriage with the God of the universe. God is not having sex with us, but we can certainly get the drift of His point. He loves to love us. If we take the time to let it sink in all over again, we will find ourselves loving to love Him back.

And that is how I found God in bed.

Dave Meurer is an award-winning humorist and the author of Mistake It Like a Man (Multnomah). This article was orginally in New Man magazine.