Close and Caring

God, Love 0

We will begin to explore the grand mystery of how a kenotic, cruciform and Christlike God can reign — can be present, active and ‘sovereign’ — in the world, when he is neither coercive nor controlling, but nevertheless infinitely close and caring. We’ll notice together how such a God rules, saves and serves by grounding and filling all that is with the power of love — a divine love with a particular content defined as consent and participation.

— Bradley Jersak, A More Christlike God, p. 121

Open Ourselves to Love

Healing, Love 0

People often think that love should be all sweetness and light – but the truth is, love frequently hurts. When we open ourselves to love, we also open ourselves up to being hurt. So many of us have learned from the time we are children to harden ourselves, to lock away our love for fear of being hurt. In locking away this love we make ourselves and our world much more coldhearted, selfish, and sadder. In locking love away deep within us, we diminish our humanity.

— Lorna Byrne, Love from Heaven, p. 2

Inescapable Love

Forgiveness, God, Love, Redemption 0

The notion of suffering as an offset for sin comes first of all, I think, from the satisfaction we feel when wrong comes to grief. We hate wrong, but, not being righteous ourselves, to a degree we cannot keep from hating the wronger as well. In this way the inborn justice of our nature passes over to evil. It is no pleasure to God, as it so often is to us, to see the wicked suffer. To regard any suffering with satisfaction, unless it be sympathetically with its curative quality, comes of evil and is a thing God is incapable of. His nature is always to forgive, and just because he forgives, he punishes. Because God is so altogether alien to wrong, because it is to him a heart-pain and trouble that one of his little ones should do the evil thing, there is, I believe, no extreme of suffering to which, for the sake of destroying the evil thing in them, he would not subject them. A man might flatter, or bribe, or coax a tyrant. But there is no refuge from the love of God. That love will, for very love, insist upon the uttermost farthing.

“That hardly sounds like love,” you say. “It’s certainly not the sort of love I care about.”

No, how should you? How should any of us care for it until we begin to know it? But the eternal love will not be moved to yield us to the selfishess that is killing us. You may sneer at such a love, but the Son of God, who took the weight of that love and bore it through the world, is content with it, and so is everyone who truly knows it.

— George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, Third Series, “Justice,” quoted in Discovering the Character of God, edited by Michael Phillips, p. 261-262

Lit from Within

Core Value, Love, Relationships 0

When we’re in the Gift Zone we hold a certain luminosity. Even in sadness we are somehow lit from within, because we are holding our experience with a quality of compassion. This is the zone that attracts love. And like anything that precious, the stakes get raised if we want to claim it. Claiming our authentic self is one of the scariest and most heroic things we can do. In our Gift Zone, there’s a sense of aliveness, a sense of self — even if that sense of self doesn’t feel as secure or happy as we think it should. We brave a new frontier when we face the risk of entering our Gift Zone And that very sense of risk heightens our ability to love.

— Ken Page, Deeper Dating, p. 26-27.

God as Father

God, Love 0

My own circle of friends finally noticed that Jesus’ favorite image of God was Father (seventy times in the Gospels!). Jesus showed us in the Gospels what fatherhood meant to him: extravagant love, affirmation, affection and belonging. It meant scandalous forgiveness and inclusion. Jesus showed us this supernaturally safe, welcoming Father-love, extended to very messy people before they repented and before they had faith. Or better, he was actually redefining repentance and faith as simply coming to him, baggage and all, to taste his goodness and mercy. He didn’t seem to appreciate our self-loathing. The repentance he wanted was that we would welcome his kindness into our deepest needs and wounds.

— Bradley Jersak, A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel, p. 22

The Best Gift We Can Give the World

Creativity, Hope, Joy, Love 0

Many of us think our happiness depends on things outside of us. We think that we have to wait to be happy until some of these things are taken care of, but happiness comes from within. It is the best gift we can give the world, because happiness is infectious. Happiness is enlightening, and it gives hope. As a form of love, happiness spreads around. If a situation seems stuck, bringing happiness to it moves it forward, because there is so much creativity in happiness.

— Chuck Spezzano, If It Hurts, It Isn’t Love, p. 254

Giving and Taking

Love 0

Teach her that to love is not only to give but also to take. This is important because we give girls subtle cues about their lives — we teach girls that a large component of their ability to love is their ability to sacrifice their selves. We do not teach this to boys. Teach her that to love she must give of herself emotionally but she must also expect to be given.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, p. 56

You Are Lovable.

God, Love 0

If you believe, as I do, that God is love, and not an old man in the sky hurling lightning bolts at unsuspecting innocents, and that this love is the creative force of the universe — and these are big ifs, I understand that — then you are, by the fact that you are created, loved. You are lovable because God loved you first.

But some people — maybe even most people — don’t see themselves that way. Far too often, we’ve been taught not to see God that way. We’ve been taught the vindictive-old-man version of God, and not the creative-force-of-love version, and so we may never have known that we are lovable. Or perhaps, through the little dramas and big traumas of life, we’ve forgotten it.

When you don’t know that you’re lovable as you are, you need someone to show you.

— Kerry Egan, On Living, p. 150-151.

Wisdom, Not Weakness

Love 0

Longing for love is not weakness. It’s wisdom. Numbing our loneliness is a path to a despair that plagues our entire culture. We are not meant to be alone and self-sufficient. Without lives filled with love, we wither inside. Intimacy is oxygen. We don’t need to transcend our hunger for love — we need to honor it.

— Ken Page, Deeper Dating, p. 4-5