It amazes and frightens me to think how few people today seem to be interested in discovering as much of God's story as they can. They are busy reading and talking about everything else in the world, from computers to music to sports, but they don't seem to be motivated to learn about God. The New York Times best-seller list seldom contains a book about God.

It's almost as if we lived in the "brave new world" described by Aldous Huxley, in which the Bible and Shakespeare and all the books about God are locked up in a safe so people can't read them; only in our society they don't have to be locked up because most people don't want to read them anyway.

How can we be intimate with a God whose history we don't know? We should all be constantly reading and listening and learning about God; then we will have taken the first step toward intimacy with Him.

II. Spend Time With God.

You can't have intimacy with anyone you don't spend time with.

You can even lose intimacy, after you've had it, with someone you have stopped spending time with.

I have seen it often with married couples. They come to the counselor, complaining that they don't feel good about each other anymore. Pretty soon, it comes out in the open. "You're hardly ever home anymore," she says, "and when you are you've got your eyes glued to the TV set!"

"Oh, yeah?" he says. "Well, you're always on the phone to our daughter or you're running off to some meeting at the church!" In the end, they realize that if they want their marriage to work, if they want intimacy to return, they have to give it time to do so. They literally have to make time for it.

People often remark on the closeness my wife and I enjoy. I will tell you the secret of it. Twenty-two years ago, when I was a young professor busy with teaching, writing, and speaking, I received a sabbatical year. We decided to spend it in Paris. For the first time in my life, I had big chunks of unprogrammed time to use in any way I chose. Our children were both in school for the first time.

My wife and I often spent half-days together walking through the beautiful city or sitting on a wall along the river Seine. We had been married fifteen years, but it was as if we had just discovered one another. Ever since then, we have valued the time we have together. We have struggled to create time when our schedules denied it. Being together has produced intimacy.

It is the same with God.

Study the life of any great saint, from Augustine to Mother Teresa. The story never varies. They are people who have time for God, who make time for God. Mother Teresa, as busy as she is, working fifteen-hour days, always begins her day with Mass. She begins with God. Then everything she does becomes sacramental.

When you have learned to do this, you miss God if you have to skip a time with Him.

Who was it, Paderewski, who said, "If I don't practice for a month, my audiences notice it. If I don't practice for a week, my friends notice it. If I don't practice for a day, I notice it."