In Love. With God.

Carley. Because Carley - 17 October

Dear Friend,

Whew. Thanks for coming back. Still a little embarrassed, but so grateful for your grace.

I didn’t finish the story last week, I want to - and to finish with far fewer words. Promise.

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I fear that I may have left you with the impression that God was a corner into which I was painted by life’s circumstances. There is truth in that. The wider the gap grew between my life expectations and my lived experience, the faster the illusion that I could control my own destiny or make my own meaning ran from me. What did I do? I ran all the harder and faster until I finally got so weary of running that I couldn’t run another step. I didn’t go seeking after God. I just stopped chasing after the wispy phantom of control because I was exhausted. Losing a family member far too young was simply nor bearable for me alone. I wasn’t even sure how much, or even if, I cared to stick around. Maybe you understand. Maybe

And there, when I stopped running, in the stillness, was God.

Yet even that was not enough in that moment. A god with a finite supply of grace and limited love would have changed nothing. A god who ran out of patience before I ran out of energy would have meant my demise. Such a god would have done nothing to lessen my desperation because I knew, deep in my deepest, truest self, that no amount of my own effort could make me good enough to survive an encounter with a just god. I needed an eternally patient god, possessing inexhaustible supply of grace and an infinite source of love. There is no way I could make myself lovely enough to become beloved. My belovedness could not depend on me or my own efforts, but had to depend, and depend exclusively, on the God who loves me no matter what.

You might counter that I simply created my own god of convenience by assigning to Him the attributes which I was desperate for God to possess. Maybe so. Maybe I was carefully crafting a god who simply offered relief for my own despair, and no more than that. I would not have been the first. Recall the blue pill discussion.

An old friend sent me a note this week that read:

The discovery of Christ is never genuine if it is nothing but a flight from ourselves. On the contrary, it cannot be an escape. It must be a fulfillment.

Ugh.

Was that who God was to me? A flight from myself? An escape?

Or a fulfillment?

A good idea?

Or real?

But a funny thing seems to be happening. It could be that this god is the best idea I could come up with in my hardest time. But I no longer believe that I created God out of my own little brain. Rather, I think, through grace, God was making God known to me as God is.

Further, I can’t even wrap my head around the thought that God could have possibly been threatened by my hubris, or even angry or irritable that I dared to believe that I might have noodled Him into existence. I am open to being wrong on all of this, but I don’t think God thinks like I do. I think this a story of grace. All of it.

Even the illusion of my own creativity, I think, may have been part of The Spirit’s gentle wake up, as a friend called it recently. Do you know those few moments when you wake up and you’re not sure where the dreaming ends and real life begins? Do you know the gray space between snoozes? As I was being awakened, I could dimly make out a loving God, but maybe definitely thought I was still dreaming. Yet as I wiped the sleep from my eyes and the sun got brighter and the birds began their morning song and I slipped on my glasses, I began to see, each moment more clearly than the last, that a loving God is not wishful thinking at all, and far more real than the dream from which I was emerging.

There was no all at once moment for me. No lightning strike of “proof.” It has been, instead, a steady accumulation of evidence, collected through the grace of waking slowly. And noticing. Day by day.

In the same letter that I mentioned above, my friend also wrote:

For it seems to me that the first responsibility of a man of faith is to make his faith really part of his own life, not by rationalizing it but by living it.

Ugh. Again.

Then what would it mean to live this faith in a God who is in love with me? I imagined asking Jesus this question, and I got a little irritated. Because, well, because you know how Jesus can be. Never answering the question directly. Always launching into a story about birds or wayward children or seeds or talents or something that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the question at all.

Imaginary conversation follows:

Me: Jesus, How do I live this?

Jesus: I think you already know the answer to your question…Say, did I ever tell you the one about the field workers?

Me: Sigh.

But that is not how it went at all. This is how it actually went:

Me: Jesus, How do I live this?

Jesus: Love God. Love your neighbor as you love yourself.

Me: Wait, what. That’s it?

Jesus: Well, start there and trust me with the rest.

Me: How long will it take for you to show me the rest?

Jesus: It will take as long as it takes.

Me: Okay then. Riddle me this, Jesus. Who is my neighbor?

Jesus: Yes.

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Since then, sometimes I forget this. Sometimes I fall back into rationalization. Sometimes I discover some grand injustice and in my zeal to address it, forget to love the person standing in front of me (i.e., my neighbor). It’s usually in those moments of failing to love my neighbor that I forget my own belovedness, or worse, I reject it altogether. Or maybe it’s forgetting my own belovedness that blinds me to the belovedness of others. I don’t know which comes first, but they are certainly related.

Yet even then, God doesn’t walk away. And each time I look over and see Him walking with me, I grow more convinced that God truly is in love with me, just as He is in love with every single neighbor - no matter who we vote for or which church we attend or our position on the hottest political or economic issues of our day. No matter how much money we make or how well we do or do not take care of our bodies. No matter if we come off the rails in a Substack post. No matter what. And no matter what means no matter what.

Father Greg Boyle once wrote about God’s no-matter-what-ness:

The desire of God’s heart is immeasurably larger than our imaginations can conjure. This longing of God’s to give us peace and assurance and a sense of well-being only awaits our willingness to cooperate with God’s limitless magnanimity.

I believe this, which means I have given my heart over to it - and completely. At first it was because I couldn’t see any other way, but increasingly, the evidence of God’s limitless magnanimity is ubiquitous, which fuels my willingness to cooperate. Whereas most days used to be a flight from myself, there are more and more fulfillment days. Not every day. Certainly not. But more days than before.

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Which takes me to the wonder of the day: What would it mean if I set aside the distinction between God and Love? What if I shrunk the distance between God and Love to zero. Like, instead of insisting that Love is something that God does, we move to a different perspective. That God is Love, itself. After all, this:

So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

What if God is eternally patient, long-suffering, and kind? What if God is gentle and lowly, and never arrogant or rude? What if God never insists on His own way? Suppose, just suppose, God is never irritable or resentful, never rejoices at wrongdoing, but rejoices with his already-beloved creatures in the truth of their belovedness? What if God bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, and what if God never, ever, ever ends?

Me: Jesus, how might I live that?

Jesus: I think you already know the answer to your question.

Me: Because you’ve already told me?

Jesus: Sigh.

Oremus,

Ć