The Lens
I think I’d be remiss – if I call myself a writer – to let the month of February go by, without writing of the love of God.
“She writes about God’s love all the time,” you might be thinking, if you’ve been here before.
And that may be so.
Or do I write about God’s love and my failings? Do I write about God’s love and our need? Do I write about God’s love and our response? Is it, perhaps, a little bit easier – to write about God’s love through my own little lens?
But what if we were to talk about His love… for its own sake?
I learned at YWAM to not keep God in a box. He is God, after all. He can do anything He likes. But He is bound by one thing: His own character. As my heart soaked up that lesson on the Character of God, that warm Spring day in California, I was also reminded how C.S Lewis said that Aslan had to obey his own rules (I’d go find the exact quote – but if I pick up a Narnia book, then I shall never come back to finish this post.) This I know: whatever God does, it is always ultimately Loving. How can it be anything else, when He Himself IS Love? (1 John 4:8)
So what is Love? We know that it’s a noun and a verb. We know agape: real giving, real serving, real constancy. Agape, the love that defined God’s character in 1 John, and the love that He proved by the gift of His Son on the Cross. We also remember phileo: all affection, and tenderness, and warmth and caring. Phileo, the love Peter swore to after denying Christ; the love that we’re to have for each other.
I see it now: in my effort to understand God’s love at a “higher” level (thinking I’m growing, pulling out the old dictionary and the pen)… trying to understand Him for the sake of His own character – wanting to see Him simply as He is, and to stop thinking of “us” for a moment – I go back to the lens I started with.
Because a Love like that couldn’t just BE for its own sake. A Love like that couldn’t be happy if it wasn’t loving. A Love like that couldn’t keep such beauty to itself.
And just like Aslan couldn’t hold back his roar, couldn’t hold back his song at the beginning of time, the one that created everything – our God of love couldn’t keep all His love to Himself. Another old friend used to say, “love creates.” He is Love. So He creates.
And here I am, content again with my own little lens. I shall understand His love because it is real in my life. And wouldn’t that be the best test of a Father’s love: that his daughter should say, “I know he is loving, because he loves me.”
Clinging to Jesus,
Laura