Do I sometimes wonder if Jesus will orphan me... if one day,
I’ll just stop hearing from Him and be left wondering if I can ever win him
back? Will I feel powerless as he drifts away, disinterested, or disappointed
in me? Of course, He’s saying "no" today. This morning, Father is saying to me,
“The thing I need you to believe is that I love you, you are my child, I
fashioned you, and there’s no way in the world that I will abandon you.” John
14 (a faithful companion the last few months) says as much: “I will not leave
you as orphans; I will come to you… If anyone
loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him and we will come to
him and make our home with him.”
I know all this stuff. But God keeps saying it to me every
time I open my ears. I guess I don’t fully believe it yet. And something tells
me he’ll still be asking me to believe His love when I’m old.
His love has been piercing the leathery layers of my
defenses for years. And even though today it makes me cry like a baby, I know
it still hasn’t totally taken over my heart. And I know it’s no good to me
unless I receive it.
I imagine myself receiving some random act of kindness from
a friend. At first, I sneer inwardly, and demand the chance to do it for
myself. Over time, my response becomes an embarrassed
refusal of his kindness. Eventually, I let him serve me but try to pay him
back. After he refuses, I let him serve me but formulate a backup plan in case
he withdraws his love. With Jesus, I hope someday I can move beyond those
responses and feel the safety to lay my head on his shoulder, close my eyes,
and just let him be nice to me. In fact I fancy that my primary “work” each
morning in my devotional time is to simply allow him to love me—none of this pursuit of holiness,
spiritual discipline, or self-improvement stuff. That’s all great stuff. But before all
I think about any of that, I sit alone on this couch and try to be open to His love…. displayed both
on the cross and in my daily life. That trust in His love is the primary task
of every Christian. Out of that simple belief flows all the personal
transformation I could ever ask for. Like Augustine said, “Love God and do as
you please.”
Once, after I was newly married, I reflected that Jesus’
love empowered me to love my wife. An atheist friend of mine took offense at
that, imagining that I believed he was unable to fully love his wife. In hindsight, I think I was
right that Jesus’ love uniquely enables people to love others. But I couldn’t
know at the time how little I understood of that love. My marriage was often
crippled by fears and paranoia. I was often critical and judgmental towards
Debra: a “love-miser”. In fact, MANY of my relationships have been guarded and
loveless. Even my relationship with Jesus sometimes looked more like a
meditative quest for self-betterment than an actual relationship.
But 2 years ago, God started busting through my defenses as
he embarrassed me with an extravagant dose of love from his Daddy-heart. I
cried a lot after that as he started to heal old hurts. There were time I would
cry at the weirdest stuff. At the same time, I started to feel this Daddy-heart
beating in ME for the first time. I developed this strange parental affection
for some of my friends. I started asking better questions and listening more
attentively. These days when I sit down with someone, I imagine I’m putting on
x-ray goggles. I imagine that I can see past their moving lips, down their
esophagus, into their hearts (metaphorically speaking…. Annabel once told me,
“Jesus looks into our hearts to see how much blood is in there!”). I try to
remember that somewhere inside, this person is a vulnerable child just like me,
that they are loved just like me. It helps me move past my anxious posturing,
judging, impressing, and sizing-up to a restful place where I can begin to love
that person because Jesus loves them with embarrassing extravagance… just like
He loves me.
If anything, I’m starting to grasp how far I am from resting
my head on His shoulder, closing my eyes, and letting Him be nice to me. It’s
not a matter of being insufficient as a disciple. Rather I think I’m over-sufficient… self-sufficient.
PS- Here are a couple things that God used to bust through
my heart with His love:
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