Shifting from Information to Intimacy in Faith

Blog by Alan Fadling

In my previous post, we explored the difference between a depth that is merely intellectual—knowing about God—and a depth that is relational, soulful, and transformative. True depth often grows in hidden, unseen places, much like the deep roots of a healthy tree. It’s not about accumulating more knowledge but cultivating a life of deeper communion with God. Here I want to explore what this greater relational depth looks like in the day-to-day rhythms of our lives. How do we move from a broad, extensive understanding of God to a deeper, more intimate experience with him?

I find that depth is hard to measure, much like the deep roots of a healthy, fruitful tree. We tend to not grow truly deep in public settings where we’re standing behind microphones, leading big meetings, or sharing our vast biblical knowledge. True depth in our lives takes time and happens invisibly for the most part, just like the underground growth of those tree roots.

The depth to which God invites us is a profound and transforming shift in our communion with him, in our relationships with others in his body, and in the character of our lives. It is an organic and living depth. It is a deep rootedness in the life and love of God. It is a depth that becomes visible through more and better fruit in our lives, our interactions, and our work.

I was recently reminded about this dynamic in the trajectory of our spiritual development while reading the classic book Prayer by Han Urs von Balthasar. In it he talks about cultivating a contemplative life of being prayerfully present with God. He sees a contemplative life as being rooted in seeking God and interacting with God. At one point he writes:

“Contemplation learns…to draw nourishment from less and less material as time goes on, as its ability grows to see and grasp depth and totality in the individual fragment. Sooner or later, by grace, it will be brought to the ’prayer of quiet,’ a prayer in which extension is replaced by the intensive dimension; the unstable, wide-ranging, discursive element of thought is replaced by a kind of intuition which takes in far more, at a single glance, than the beginner’s roving eye.”*

What is he talking about? Essentially, he’s saying there is a movement from wide to deep as we grow in faith. For example, there is something good in the spiritual practice of reading through the Bible in a year. I’ve done it many times. We gain that beautiful vision of the scope of what God has said and done over time. This is the “extensive” way that Von Balthasar speaks of.

Over time, though, we often find ourselves hungry and thirsty to go deeper with a few simple truths. Recently, I finished reading through The Message version of the Bible, which was gifted to me a few years ago by one of my sons. But it took me three years to make that journey. I slowed down. And I often stopped whenever a passage, even a line or a word, came alive for me in the moment.

I would pray that little passage back to God. I would sit in quiet and reflect on what it meant as it spoke to my life in the present season. I would imagine what that passage would look like in my lived-out experience that day. The extensive approach of my early years of faith is beginning to be replaced by a more intensive way of engaging with God.

Might God be inviting you today not just to go wider in your knowledge of him but to go deeper in your way of being with him? Maybe the depth we seek is less about accumulating still more information and more about allowing what we already know to shape us more profoundly. I often remark how it seems that God is just helping me remember what I already know!

What would it look like for you to embrace a more rooted, relational, and receptive depth in your own life? Maybe it starts with a simple shift—slowing down as you engage with Scripture, paying closer attention to the movements of God in your heart, or being more fully present to the people in your life.

My encouragement to you is this: Don’t settle for just knowing more. Let what you know lead you into deeper communion, deeper love, and deeper trust. Because in the end, true depth isn’t measured by how much we learn but by how much we’re being transformed.

For Reflection:

• Where in your current walk with God do you sense an invitation to slow down—moving from “covering more ground” to going deeper in a single insight?
• What is one simple truth or Scripture you already know that you could sit with more prayerfully this week, allowing it to shape your way of being?
• How might you become more attentive to the quiet, unseen ways God is forming deep roots in you—even when there’s little outward evidence?

*Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer, trans. by Graham Harrison (Ignatius Press, 1955, 1986), p. 131.