Where is the love?
I have a deep yearning to know and feel God’s love. I’m in an interesting season in my life. There are some relationships that I have upheld as a form of identity for myself and through those relationships I have loved as deeply as I knew how to. All of those relationships have transformed and no longer provide the same sustenance that they once did. I’m being broken down, my sense of identity completely shattered. It’s as if God has inserted himself into my life and decreased my interactions, changed my heart posture so that all I could do was come to Him. In reading 1 John 4:7-21, John tell us that God is love and when we love, we know God.
“We love because he loved us first”
But what if you’re view on love and how you were giving and receiving love gets damaged? I find myself having to start fresh and go back to square one, learning what love truly is and is not. I often tell a story of how back at the start of 2020 (before the pandemic hit) I shouted to God at the top of a mountain saying that I am ready to be who HE created me to be. My life utterly broke down after that prayer. In fact I’m still clearing out the rubble as I write this. God stripped me of all perceived safety and security in anything that was not Him. Now I spend a great amount of my time praying and allowing God to rebuild me. This hasn’t been easy. If you are married, a parent, an exalted child, a person of status in your career, imagine that position or title that you hold most dear being adapted into what God desired for you, not the other way around.
One thing I’ve asked God in the past and I’ve heard other people ask is why would God allow for a certain situation and circumstance to happen? God broke it down. Bear with me. At times we get ourselves into situations that weren’t even what God wanted for us in the first place and then we ask why He allowed it to happen. God gave us free will. We made those decisions of our own volition. In fact God loves us so much that He will often send us a messenger telling us hey, that might not be the direction you wanna go in and we may get defensive and push back on that message and say that WE have a right to choose. And if the situation or circumstance that we may be getting into is really bad, God many send a messenger multiple times in many different forms. So why be mad at God?
Yeah I know it’s a hard pill to swallow but the beauty is that we can come to Him when it all comes down and He will rebuild us and set us on the path that He designed for us. When I asked God to come into my life He cleaned house. All that I had known, believed and stood on was dismantled. Initially I called out to God asking why. Why was I being punished? To make matters worse I had to be silent and not clap back or defend myself when I wanted to. In rare moments when I was crying and pleading to take action He would tell me Do nothing. Say nothing. Let me take care of it. It took some time but He calmed my storms. My conversations with God turned into prayers then they turned into praise. A situation would come along and try to knock me off my square and I started thanking God for His love and protection. I may have been rattled for a bit but I got back to center and grounded myself in God’s love.
So back to what I was initially presenting in regards to my relationships. In each realm of my life (family, friend, self) God has revamped my relationships to show me how loved I am. And for the relationships that still need some work, He has set them aside and is taking care of them on my behalf. While He does that I lean into Him to nourish me. That’s all He’s ever wanted is for me to come to Him so that He can wrap himself around me and remind me that I am loved. There is a verse that has been my beacon of light when it comes to love. When you have a chance read all of Ephesians 3:14-21 but I will share the parts within this larger text that I rest on.
“...that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith - that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
I’ll come back to this passage in another post and dive deeper into this cause it’s so good. But I want to end here with this and let you meditate on these words.