Kingdom Advance
No Matter What
by John V. Upton, Executive Director, BGAV AND VBMB
These days I find myself wanting to get back to the basics of what faith and church and witness and spiritual nurture are all about. It has been a slow, enjoyable, and painful endeavor because words are strange little things to put to faith. Yet words have the power to create, for evil or good. Take the word “fire.” It’s just one syllable. But by common agreement it stands for something real and quite dangerous. Just saying the word has actual power to create responses and cause panic. The word “fire” is so dangerous that it is illegal to shout it in a crowded room if the real thing isn’t there.
At the same time, words are very fragile. As powerful as a particular word might be, you can easily drain it completely of all its strength and meaning. All you have to do is repeat it over and over again – fire, fire, fire, fire, fire – and now it’s nothing but meaningless noise. Sadly and inevitably, it happens to some of our very best words. Precisely because certain words stand for the best that we know, we want to say them often, and we unwittingly put them at risk.
One of those words happens to be the cornerstone word of our faith: “love.” And when I want to get back to the basic of what all this faith business is about, it often rings empty and shallow. Love, love, love, love, love – how many times have we heard that word or read it or said it or sung it? In all this usage of the greatest of words, it has cooled, faded, and flattened into a vague and routine sound. It’s an ongoing challenge for us who mean to care to keep on hearing and saying the word “love” in ways that are fresh and real and true.
It wasn’t always like this. When I was a young child, it really did mean something to me. I couldn’t define it in words, but I can tell you how it felt. It felt like pleasantness. It was warm like a smile, cheerful like a friend, secure like a pair of arms holding me. This was my experience of how the One who made me cherished me – especially if I had been good! “God is love” and “Jesus loves me” felt like that. Did it feel like that to you? Does it still?
I have to be honest and say that for me it has changed, because my early understanding of God’s love was too simple minded, too innocent, and too small to last. But even as I outgrew my understanding of it, I kept right on saying it, singing it, and hearing it until, sure enough, it flattened into sound that didn’t carry much power. God loves me – well, of course. This wasn’t news. At least most days, it didn’t amaze me or move me, which is to say that like many people, perhaps even you, I had stopped really hearing “God loves.”
What can restore our hearing? Unfortunately, it often takes hardship or grief – the hardship of a failed marriage or a lost job or grief over a dreaded disease, poor choices, the loss of a loved one, or an utterly destroyed illusion of oneself. Something happens to us that eventually open us up again to the words “God loves.”
We discover that God’s love isn’t about pleasantness or innocence. It’s about the way things actually are. We believe the world was created good, but it’s very badly broken now. And I am badly broken and so are you and so are all our families and all our communities and all our countries and our churches. Amidst all that, what can be said about God’s love? I think most of us have assumed that what God really loves is the world as it might be, that God loves us as we still might become, loves us as we fulfill the dreams God had for us. But that kind of thinking is dangerously false because it leads into dangerous naiveté or dangerous expectations of ourselves or dangerous despair.
Here is what I have come to hold as true and what I believe the Bible declares: God, the Creator, who is Holy and perfect good, entirely loves the world exactly as it is and entirely loves us as we actually are – flawed, ignorant, guilty, hopeful, trying, failing, loving, hating, and dying. God is love toward the world as it is and us as we are in whatever good place or bad place we are actually in. God is down in those places with us and suffers those places with us. Fully knowing what the world might have been and might yet become, fully knowing who we might have been and might still become, God loves the actual world and us, suffers the actual world and us, never ceasing, never retreating, never letting go, always embracing, always enduring – always, no matter what, God is love. That is the one power that can change us, and it will.
Shame can’t cut us off. Feeling abandoned or anxious or angry can’t cut us off. Failure and sin can’t cut us off. Confusion and sorrow and weariness can’t cut us off. “So high you can’t get over it, so low you can’t get under it, so wide you can’t get around it.” As you are, where you are, you are joined, accepted, borne, forgiven, entirely loved. Let that amaze you and let it move you. Over time it will even change you and me. Now, that’s getting back to the basics.
With Permission