I’ve made a habit of rephrasing the line “God loves you,”
and instead of making it about God, I make it about the object of God’s
relentless affection – us. So,
throughout “The Shack,” Papa would say, “I am especially fond of her or
him.” There is a world of difference
between saying “I love you,” which is about me, and saying “I am especially
fond of you,” which is about you. Both
are correct, but the latter somehow pierces the disquiet of our souls and says,
“Yes, I know you love me, but do you know me and do you like me? You love because that is the way you are, but
is there anything about me that is worth
loving?” Do you ‘see’ me, and do you
like what you ‘see’?”
Wm. Paul
Young
____________________________
We constantly say God is love.
And we believe it,
Kind of,
Mostly.
But we struggle to believe that God’s love
Trickles down
To us
Personally
I can believe God loves humankind
But I have more trouble believing God loves
This particular human
Stephen
There is that nagging doubt.
And that insidious belief that God loves me
If
If I am good enough
If I accomplish enough
I might believe God loves me for what I can do
Or have done
“Have I been good enough”
But I struggle to embrace the reality
that God just, simply, loves me
With all my flaws,
With my history of bad choices
If God really knows me
God can’t really love me
Love me abstractly perhaps, because
The Sacred has no choice, right?
But like me?
If I met God face to face, would God say,
“I am particularly fond of you? You are my favorite child?”
(We are ALL ‘God’s favorite child’, just as my children
are ALL my favorites)
And what does it mean,
If I cannot accept the compassionate, grace-filled
embrace of God
For me, it makes me insecure. It makes me feel less.
Empty
Unloved
And it causes me
To hide behind certainty and competence
Behind answers that I sow like seeds.
It causes me to create a wall that keeps people at a
distance
It forces me to prove myself (which makes me appear
arrogant, when really I struggle to believe I am really OK)
It can be worse.
It can force people to make others less so they can be
more.
It can cause people to inflict pain on others to numb
their own pain,
It causes people to believe that enough is never enough
and become bloated with power and wealth.
The more power, the more influence we have
The more damaging it is to fail to believe that God is
fond of us.
Poor Donald Trump.
And Pete Hegseth.
If we look at their behavior, we must see it as a sign
That they are terrified
That they feel unloved.
And unlovable.
So they must force those around them to respect and
admire them.
Look at my arch!
Watch me do pull-ups!
And they end up walking through life spreading pain and
hate
Division and destruction.
My friends, God loves you.
More, God is especially fond of you.
And me
And, yeah, Donald Trump
We can hate, perhaps despise what people do
We can hate ideologies of hate
But we can’t hate people (OK, we do, but we probably
shouldn’t)
Because hate will not solve anything.
Hate engenders hate
That is why Jesus on the cross refused, even then,
To hate the people who had put him there.
Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.
Honestly, I couldn’t have done that
Or if I could have uttered the words, “Father, forgive
them,”
I would have ended with, “because they are idiots,
stupid.”
Thank you, God
That you were especially fond of Pilate, and those men at
the foot of the cross;
And that you are especially fond of those I think are
spectacularly dangerous and wrong;
And that you are especially fond of me.
