Most of us have been in a place or gone through the experience where imagining being "just friends" with someone we deeply care about fills us with disappointment, sadness, frustration, anger, depression, hurt, and tons of other painful emotions that drag us down.
Those experiences suck. They suck bad.
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In those relationships, the other person does not want to commit to you in a way that makes your relationship more serious because their feelings and attachment to you doesn't reflect yours. Well why does that make a difference? It makes a huge difference, as we all know, because in relationships there is an aspect of mutuality and responsibility both parties share. You are responsible to him/her and she/he is responsible to you; and you both want it that way.
That is one of the things that makes relationships so beautiful; mutuality. You both want what it is you have with each other. At least, you want it enough to stay in it and work through things and hopefully have something that is really rewarding and amazing. (Granted, that is not always how it looks, but for the sake of my point I'll stick to the more positive side of things.)
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So, when you get into a relationship with a person, you have the responsibility to not hurt that person. That person has handed you their heart and now they trust you to keep it and not kill it. Sometimes, rejecting their heart because you are not up for that responsibility doesn't make things not hurt, its just a different stage of the process that brought about the pain; it came sooner than later.
Rob Bell, in his book Sex God, wrote that when we love another person and want to pursue something romantic with them, we are handing our heart to them. When they turn us down, the reason it aches and hurts so bad deep inside is because we offered a piece of ourselves to them and they rejected it. That hurts. That hurts bad.
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How often do you think that we tell God we want to stay "just friends" with Him?
I gotta tell you, I think that God loves us so much that He chases after us and pursues us constantly. I think a lot of times God asks us to have a very intimate and deep relationship with him, but we freeze. We will stop dead in our tracks, because we don't want that responsibility. Some of us think that we can't handle the responsibility, and some of us just don't want to be that tied down. Being good friends is much safer.
The more casual our relationship with God the more insulated we feel from our responsibility to Him.
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Unfortunately, or maybe not so unfortunately, we can't really side step what our relation to God is. When it comes down to it, we can put it off and stall and make as many excuses as we want, but we were made to be in an intimate relationship with God. It is simply in our design as creatures.
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It is a crushing blow to love someone and have them reject your heart and hand it back to you. Love is just a dangerous game. C.S. Lewis wrote that the only place we will ever escape all the dangers of love outside of Heaven will be Hell. Since we aren't in Heaven and we are hopefully not on the way to Hell, love is always going to be here and it is always going to be dangerous and tough. That is just the way our world works. But even still, loving is the most rewarding thing and, ultimately, the most Christ-like thing many of us will ever do in this world.
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I'm not sure if you remember what it feels like to be told that someone didn't want to have a relationship that was anything more than friends with you, when you clearly had feelings that were much stronger than friendship. If you don't know from experience, let me tell you that it is crushing. It can cripple you.
So now take a look at your relationship with God. We all know where He stands and what His feelings toward us are. We all know how much He loves us; so much that He died for us. But what are you saying back to Him? That is what really matters. We can't change God and how He pursues us or the fact that He loves us. All we can do is change our response to His love.
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"If you have ever given yourself to someone and had your heart broken, you know how God feels. If you have ever given yourself to someone and found yourself waiting for their response, exposed and vulnerable, left hanging in the balance, you know how God feels." - Rob Bell
Peace.
