The Aggravation of Love

God loves you. Probably the most used phrase in all of Christian history, and for good reason. You could say that that tiny phrase is one of the irreducible cores of all of Scripture. God loves you. But like most phrases, when it’s been used enough, it begins to lose it’s meaning. If God loves me means that God has sentimental feelings of affection for me, then that’s super. But doesn’t He have that for everybody? Does this mean anything for my daily life? But what if the love God has for us isn’t just sentimental feelings of affection? I believe that God’s love for me isn’t a fact that I should know in my head. It’s an active, aggressive process that He wants to engage me in, one that will provoke me throughout the entirety of my life. His love seems to push and pull, beckon and seduce, challenge, and at times even appears to ignore. I can never take His love for granted because I never know how it will manifest itself at any given moment. His love makes my life an unpredictable adventure. Just when I thought I had this whole thing figured out, God sits me next to most chatty person in history at the coffee shop, and seems to whisper into my heart that His love has something to do with what’s about to happen. Because the experience of His love is constantly changing, my response is constantly changing as well. Sometimes I love God by singing to Him, sometimes by reading, sometimes by talking to a stranger, sometimes by simply trusting, and other times by being angry. The song I was taught to sing when I was young wasn’t joking when it taught that God’s love is like “a fountain flowing deep and wide”. Being loved by God is a lot like being carried down stream. It’s deep so my feet can’t reach the ground and control it. It’s wide, so I can’t reach to the side and escape it. It bruises me, frustrates me, cleans me, and calms me. It’s constantly changing and at the end, I will be in a very different place because of it.