As 2011 ends I’ve been thinking a lot about the year. It’s been a crazy one for me. Last January seems like a life time ago. The other night I counted as best as I could remember, how many different places I’ve slept this year, and I came up with something over eighty. Looking back it seems kind of insane. Never really seams that way looking forward though. Anyway. Something that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is beginnings and endings. And how God relates his love to us inside of our time bound world.
I have no paradigm to understand true love. And that’s because true love “knows”. It knows everything yet still exists. I simply cannot understand how God could love me. I look back on my life, and everything that I have done and It staggers me that God could see every part of me and still love me more then I can understand.
Our world is bound by time. Everything has beginnings and endings. I personally love to finish things. I take great satisfaction in finishing something that I started. I can have that satisfaction, because I look back at the project, and all the things that I did, and how they resulted in something good. So when I look at myself I don’t see what God sees. I get hopelessly hung up on the timeline, and everything in it.
“You are who you choose to be”. Every person chooses who they are going to be. I think this is key to understand if we are going to try and understand God’s love for us. He allows us to choose death, in the chance that we would choose Him. True love cannot be forced or controlled. It can only be given.
God exists outside of time. He created time. He has no beginning or end. So when he looks at us I don’t think he sees what we see. He doesn’t just see history and future, He see’s us. Our heart. Who we really are. What we have chosen to be. How our heart responds to his love. This is how David could be known as a man after God’s heart. That man made a lot more bad choices than I have, at least by the worlds standards. But I don’t think God saw those things as much as he actually saw “him”. Read the psalms and you can hear some of his heart.
I hope that you can connect all of these thoughts. I’m still working through them myself.
Father help us understand your love. Help us to respond to your love. Help us to, like David, care more about responding to you personally then the circumstances around us. Help us to be identified with your love…………………….. MT
