Day Two…
RENOVATION OF THE HEART: GOD’S LOVE FOR YOU.
You,
being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the
saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and
to know this love that surpasses knowledge-that you may be filled to the
measure of all the fullness of God. Ephesians 3:17-19
Sometimes I
think that if we set any human struggle in the center of the room and peeled it
back, layer by layer, when we arrived at the core we would run smack into this
question of the love of God. It is the great, fundamental wondering we carry
inside us: Does God love me? Really love me? Beyond tolerating me
of having to love me because that’s what God does? Has God actually set His
affection on me for not reason at all? If I let that in-that He loves me,
that He loves ME-then even the struggle itself starts to change shape.
Often when
talking about the love of God, the questions of “how” arises: How do I
experience more of God’s love? I have discovered in solitude and silence that
God is much more willing to love me than I have been able to let Him. Of
course, you will encounter at first what wel all encounter in the silence and
solitude: the deafening distractions of you other life and a thousand
condemning voices. Henri Nouwen expresses it this way: In solitude I get rid
of my scaffolding: no friends to talk with, no telephone calls to make, no
meeting to attend, no music to entertain, no books to distract, just me-naked,
vulnerable, weak, sinful, deprived, broken-nothing. It is in this nothingness
that I have to face in my solitude, a nothingness so dreadful that everything
in me wants to run to my friends, my work, and my distractions...the task is to
persevere in my solitude, to stay in my cell until all my seductive visitors
get tired of pounding on my door and leave me alone.
Nouwen says
that our need to withdraw, to meet God in silence and solitude, is about
shaking off our compulsions so that we can dwell in the gentle healing presence
of God. There we encounter His love. In experiencing His love, we are always
going to be standing on the edge of a vast ocean with our feet barely wet,
longing to swim to the other side. The quest itself is what keeps us moving
forward, moving deeper. Paul is saying that is we want to know something of the
fullness of God, then we will camp our in the territory of His love.
Love: Delighting in God's Tenderness by
Paula Rinehart Issue #114 November/December
1999 Discipleship Journal
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