How wonderful to think how beautiful God is in His LOVEliness!
God is vulnerable and we can be too..for we are truly loving by nature just as He is, made in His image as we are! Like Father, like children!
We are not bad or
selfish but need to get rid of the idea that we are..once we see
ourselves as beloved apart from our actions, and as good apart from our
thoughts and feelings and behaviors, we feel safe and can afford to let
others misunderstand or defame us, and we find ourselves freed up to
love others instead of trying to get love..
For we know we are loved,
safe and "good eggs"..one with God who is vulnerable and generous Love..so that frees us up to finally be ourselves, for we are vulnerable and
generous Love as well..
It's not the Real, True Self (spirit) that needs to 'go down'
and 'be humbled' or whatever, it's the false ideas of ourselves that
need to die out, and they automatically do in the light of God's truth
dawning upon us..
And so often we can only really see and dare to believe this
truth when it's demonstrated just after a massive fail!
I truly feel He doesn't orchestrate such failures or difficult times, and they are not 'punishment from God' or anything like that! He is simply amazing enough to bring something beautiful out of those moments of 'wipeout' ..beauty for ashes..He is able to take the worst things we do and turn them something more beautiful than we could ever imagine! Men may concoct a crucifixion, but God is in the business of resurrection! As Robert Capon says, the worst we can be is dead, but since He is the Resurrection and the Life, that makes us just His cup of tea!
So we find the 'lean times' or 'desert wanderings' are not the wasted or squandered times but instead the stuff from which He makes beautiful miracles in our hearts, times when we see into eternity and catch a glimpse of His love more beautiful than we'd ever seen before!
For if He loves
us and sees us as innocent and good THEN, at what we think of as 'our worst moments,' then He ALWAYS sees us innocent, beloved and good and it must
actually BE TRUE that we really ARE the innocent, good, beloved, loving
creatures He says we are!
To me, this is the message of the cross and resurrection..that even when we did the worst thing we could do and killed His Son, He simply absorbed all our 'wrath' and called us innocent, taking care of our crime by even removing the evidence of it - the body itself - by raising His Son back to life without a word of anger against us, without a single reproach, simply holding out His hands to embrace us and give us the full experience of His love and life that has always been our birthright as His created children! THAT is true acceptance, THAT is eternal security, THAT is unconditional Love, THAT is truly good news!
The cross and resurrection shouts out that good news of unconditional love, and it truly seems to hit home for us personally at those moments of massive fail..when we find He hasn't left us at all but is still there, loving us, caressing us, blessing us, carrying us along..and at that moment the truth dawns upon us in a new way..that He really isn't going to leave us, no matter what we do..GRACE..it's true! He really IS all grace and love and not a bit of law or judgment!
The lying voices die away and the intense
need to prove our right-ness melts off like fog before the morning sun,
and the intense cravings for love, now satisfied, turn into quiet
contentment simply to BE as we are, to enjoy both God and life, to enjoy
both love and loving, seeing we are wrapped in such a LOVE that defies
description!!
I feel this is the most beautiful and profound experience in the world, to find out how deeply we are loved and how purely and absolutely God's nature IS that very love!
