Periodic Ponderings on the Love of God
Edition 1: Volume 2

February 2, 2010

I understand the perfect love of God imperfectly.

I’m setting down two basic truths here. One, that the love of God is perfect love, and two, that I will never be able to comprehend such love.

By perfect love, I mean perrrrrrfect. A love that’s flawless, incomparable, and most excellent in all the world and all creation. A love that’s the fullest manifestation of any and all love that has ever and ever will be. A love that can never be matched, replicated, or surpassed. I appreciated that in one thesaurus it offered an alternate to the word perfect with the phrase something that is too good to be true. God’s perfect love is too good to be true but here’s the real kicker….it is true.

And still I struggle to understand it. Even with my heart and eyes wide open to receiving the truth of the perfect love of God I, like everyone else including you, see through a glass darkly, because I view the love of God through eyes filmed over by a lifetime of human experiences of love that even in their most awesome, breathless, magnificence, are merely a sliver of a shadow of all that is held within the perfect love of God. Barely a reflection. Less than a full bite.

I’m one of the fortunate ones. I’ve been extravagantly loved most of my life. My grandparents loved me. My parents loved me. My siblings loved me back when I was their annoying baby sister and continue to love me now that I’m their annoying middle-aged baby sister. I’ve had dear friends at every turn in my life who’ve loved me and the children I taught and learned from over the past 30 years have spoiled me with love. And then there’s my beautiful angel of a wife who loves me in a way I can barely believe after ten years of being drenched in it.

And the love I’ve been given has been more than a love of feelings expressed in gushy words but a love of commitment lived out in action. Even when our worlds collided over my sexual orientation my parents continued to demonstrate the deepest of love toward me. Even though my siblings and I have gone through the ringer with one another and our love has been laced with mutual irritation and frustration, love has carried us through so that even at our worst moments we could rest assured that the others had our back. The little kiddos who loved me decades ago when I was their Teacher Anita have continued to love me long into their adulthood, a love so kind and generous I’m rattled by it. And though I’m a high maintenance girl who at times can be as cantankerous and moody as a grizzly bear roused from sleep during mid-hibernation, my wife’s love continues without so much as a hiccup.

So here’s all I’m saying. I know what it is to love and be loved and yet despite the heaping mountain of love I’ve been graced to receive, all the love I’ve known, even the greatest of it, has been less than perfect love, and for no other reason than whenever people are in the equation so too is imperfection. We can’t help it. It’s the nature of the beast…or more precisely, it’s in the nature of our beings. Even in the purest expressions of human love our personality flaws and egos occasionally stumble onto the scene. We become irritable and impatient with someone we love because they dare to see things another way than we do. We can love someone with every fiber of our being and still get angry at them when they fail to see and acknowledge our way is always the best way. We hurt those we love without ever intending to but still we do because we’re human and fallible. Self-centeredness at times trumps selflessness. Pride takes humility to the mat and scores a point. I’ve been loved like crazy all my life and I’m as grateful as grateful can be and yet love has let me down time and again and I know just as certainly that everyone I’ve loved has been let down by me whether they be my family, my friends, or my wife. Certainly more than once. Probably more than twice.

So here I am, an imperfect being, loving and being loved imperfectly while at the same time longing to lay hold of a more full understanding of the perfect love of God. And it’s not such an easy thing to do because every time I try to comprehend God’s love I have to slog through the collective experiences of love, both radiant and tarnished that have filled my life and those experiences become a filter through which I catch a foggy glimpse of the love of God.

They say that acknowledging you have a problem is the first step toward finding the solution and that could never be more true than in acknowledging I view the perfect love of God through a glass darkly. I need to be aware of my limited vision of God’s love so that I’m always intent on looking to see beyond the windows murky shadows, to catching a vision of a love that defies my human experience, and that not only goes beyond the greatest love I’ve ever known but beyond all the combined human love that’s ever been lavished upon me.

God loves you and me with a perfect love, and yes, I know….it really is too good to be true. And yet, it is. How awesome is that?!

Posted in Periodic Reflections on the Love of God