This morning, as I was putting on my son’s shoes to go out, his daddy came downstairs. As Jon walked around the door into the lounge, the look in Nathanael’s eyes was one of pure delight. It was the most beautiful thing to see.

It made me think about my last blog, and Psalm 37, about ‘delighting in God’. Watching Nathanael with my husband teaches me a lot about how God wants us to be with Him as a Father.

Nathanael has incredible hunger for Jon’s presence, company and intimacy. He often sobs when his daddy so much as leaves the room, or car. And his desperation to get to him, when he gets home from work, meant that a few weeks ago he tried to climb over his Gaga, to get onto a sofa and through a hole in the wall to get to him as fast as possible.

Delighting in Jon doesn’t mean that Nathanael doesn’t like other things, or all they do is look into one another’s eyes loving each other. It means that whether eating, bathing, playing, or going to sleep, he wants to be with his daddy doing it. And the thing he enjoys doing most about any of those things, is being with daddy.

God wants it to be the same for us with Him.

Nathanael’s hunger for his daddy’s presence is the type of hunger our Father wants us to have for being with Him too.

When you delight in someone, or something, you hunger for it and it’s ok to give yourself to that hunger. God wants to fill it!

He wants us to run to be with Him.

There was a season where I couldn’t wait to leave work to get home, to spend time alone with Him. He was the river in the garden of my life that cleansed, sustained and refreshed me.

Seasons change and my walk doesn’t always look like that, but whatever the season, we’re in a healthy place if we’re hungering for Him.

And what will we do to prioritise getting to be with our Father? Will we push aside other things, as Nathanael did to get to Him?

Sometimes I’ve known God was calling me to fast TV, or stop reading novels. More recently I’ve needed to spend time with Him first when Nathanael sleeps, before doing my chores, or other things I’d like to do.

Proverbs 4:23 says, ‘Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it,’ we need to be conscious of the state of our hearts, and whether our Father is still our first love. If we don’t guard our hearts and if He isn’t our first love, then it becomes more difficult to delight in Him.

Pushing other things aside, is one way to guard our hearts and keep Him our first love.

Finally, delighting in Him isn’t just about shutting ourselves away in a room to talk with Him. It’s enjoying Him in our day to day life: worshipping Him and thanking Him for His creation as we go for walks; being conscious of Him as we do life, sharing it with Him, talking and listening as we go; seeking His will in the everyday of our lives and joyfully living that, wanting to have our eyes on Him whatever our circumstances.

It’s simply the way He intended relationship with Him to be, not doing life with Him under duress but in delight.