Sometimes it takes me months and years to see a situation with enough clarity to feel comfortable to write about it. Writing to me is more than just recording thoughts, although that is a large part of it. Sometimes, I have to do more than write. It took year after year of tyrannical government for the Founding Fathers to finally sit down and write the Declaration of Independence, and sometimes it takes me months and even years to sit down and write my own declarations. But here I am, unleashing my cumulative thought process over several years into the following sentence:
God's love is amazing.
Okay, so if you just won the lottery or your team won the Superbowl, my above conclusion probably isn't more than a nice statement that seems to ring true in light of your recent good fortune. But what about those people out there who received an untimely collection letter from the IRS, or just lost a loved one to disease? My above conclusion probably makes them want to tilt their head back and retch.
I have belonged to both of those groups at different times of my life. I have been the King of the World and a beggar in the streets of a city not my own. The truth of God's love is unchanging. During my worst times, His love seemed to be a distant and elusive concept or ideal to me at that moment, but in hindsight it was when His love showed up in greater measure.
As a kid, we are indoctrinated by songs like “Jesus Loves Me” and we sing them over and over like cute little religious drones, reciting that the bible tells us so, but not really knowing where it says that or giving us any reason why it says that. As a young man, that really bothered me. Why does God love me? Never mind the whole idea of whether or not I measure up...that is beyond the point I am trying to make. The Bible says He loves me, and in church the preacher says He loves me, and on TV people at sporting events hold up bible references that say God loves us. But it is all meaningless unless we really know it and live in relation to the love He professes for us. My point is, if people really understood the nature of God’s love, the world or at least the Church (by church, I mean the collective group of professing Christianity, despite denomination) would be drastically different.
About five years ago, I was struggling to find a firm footing in my spiritual walk, and I remember laying in bed at night, thinking to myself how the evidence of my life overwhelmingly contradicted the fact that I call myself a Christian. I remember praying about it, and telling God that I honestly felt no love for Him, even though I knew I was supposed to. I just couldn’t love some storybook character, or some distant unknown entity that showed very little indication that He had any interest in my day to day activity. “Because the Bible tells me so” was no longer reason enough for me to believe it. God is not a book, and I was not going to live my life in conversation with a book. Yes, the Bible is His Word, but His Word is not confined to the Bible, just as my words and thoughts are not confined by this text. The whole idea of not loving God was a terrifying and crushing idea to me, so I decided to really find out what His love was all about. The Bible says that we love because He first loved us...but I was not there yet...my love for Him was uncertain at best.
So I did two things. I read what I could find on the subject of love, mainly in the Bible, and I tried my hardest to muster up some feeling of affection for Him as I went throughout my days. The truth is I really don’t feel like I got very far with all that. Prayer felt half-hearted and forced, so I prayed little. Reading about love in the Bible was interesting at least, but it was still hard for me to understand, especially when I read things like: “love your enemies,” “God is love,” “if you don’t know love, you don’t know God.” I just felt even more distanced from Him...because I sure didn’t feel like I knew love.
One night, as I lay in bed wrestling with these thoughts, I could come up with no other question I had not asked about love, so I asked Him what His best example of Love was. I really expected Him to tell me all about Jesus on the cross and take me to the gospels, but as clearly as I have ever heard Him, so clearly that I could hear the smile in His whisper, He gave me an answer that opened everything up to me. “My creation” was His answer. It was late, and I was tired, but after those two little words, I was wide awake. “How is that possibly an example of your love?” I asked Him.
Maybe He had been waiting for me to ask Him the right question, or maybe He had been preparing me to be desperate enough to be able to hear His answer. I don’t know. As soon as I asked him to explain His answer to me, all the scripture that I had not understood started flooding back into my thoughts, and I was starting to understand what they meant. It really was like putting a puzzle together, and until then, I had no idea what the finished product was supposed to look like.
The first thing I did was to go back to Genesis and look at creation. As I reread the story of creation, my question about how this was an example of love kept ringing in my head. Then it hit me. God created the heavens and the earth. In light of the fact that God is love, what God showed me was that His very nature is creative, His love creates. (Warning, I am about to get somewhat philosophical, but stay with me.) Where there is nothing to love, God in His love creates an object for his affection, because that is who He is. What really blew my head off was the next realization I came to. The masterpiece of His creation was not the heavens, earth or animals. It was man. Only man was created in His image and likeness, meaning that man was created with a like nature to God, who is love, and therefore love is also a part of our nature.
Among animals, love is a phenomenon found only among men. Dogs are loyal, cats are affectionate (at least for a split second), but no animal other than man can love. So what does our love look like. When I think of love in our societies, I think of red heart-shaped boxes of chocolate, couples hand in hand on a beach, or just about any scene from a typical romance movie on Lifetime. The usual. I am convinced that the true nature of love is widely misunderstood and watered down to merely being nice to your neighbors. The standard of love I see in scripture created the universe, healed the sick, spoke words of life to the weary and dying, multiplied bread and fish, turned water into wine, and died so that I could live. No wonder I had not really felt love for this God. All anyone ever told me was that He loved me because He says so. But that doesn’t fill up my soul with longing to love Him back. He created the universe and everything in it to love me, and He gives me the option to love Him back and cooperate with Him in His creation.
If there is one thing I know about myself, just from knowing who I am and what I am like, it is that I was born for love. I was born to give it, I was born to need it. There is nothing I have ever been more certain of in all my life. There is a void in all of us that craves it. But when I love people, what is that love creating in them? Wow, what a question. If I really love, when I walk by a sick person, what should I do? A pat on the back? A helping hand? A new spinal column, heart valve, endocrine gland?
I think about this all the time. I think about the true nature of love. Romance is wonderful, but true love looks at swindlers, murderers, adulterers, blasphemers square in the face and offers them places of honor at His table. If you don’t believe me, read the old testament. Then read the new testament, its even crazier. On his way to execute Christians, love converted Paul into the greatest advocate and teacher of Christianity yet. I cannot believe that God does not move in amazing and marvelous ways when it is His very nature to do so. I cannot believe that we are not called to do the same, because it is His very nature with which we were created. Jesus said we would perform greater things than He. Scripture also says He did so many great and wonderful things that books could not contain them. We are so far from that standard it is sad. I never liked playing catch-up, but this time I am pretty sure that it will be worth every second.
God’s love is truly amazing. So is mine. So is yours.
I LOVE this.
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