Summer of Love Pt. 1

This summer (so far) has been an interesting journey for me. Mostly spiritual & emotional at this point. And it's all revolved around love in one way or another.


Actually, I can't seem to get away from the topic. When the summer started I wanted to use part of it as a sort of spiritual retreat to (as I told one friend) re-ground myself spiritually. For me this meant getting back into the habit of daily quiet time and prayer...and beginning to do some work on my heart that's needed to be done for a long time.


Allowing God to work on your heart is a wonderful and terribly frightening journey. It involves facing issues like trust and belief and well...love. Not to mention going over things from your past you thought were buried years ago. Nope! If you begin to open up your heart for healing when it's been wounded you'll find the mending process to involve its own amount of pain. But, it's worth it.


At the start of summer I began this journey by reading (a.k.a. crying my way through) two books. Captivating by John & Stasi Eldredge and Do You Think I'm Beautiful by Angela Thomas. They are both incredible and worth the reading. (And I'm not sure that everyone cries their way through the way I did - I'm fairly certain the journey is different for each person).


In reading these books, I had some major revelations about myself and things in my life that I thought I'd dealt with quite well. I realized something kind of interesting that I thought of again this morning as I sat in church.


Today was the start of a new sermon series at the church I go to (Oasis Christian Center) called Roommates, Bad Dates, & Great Mates (I told you, I can't escape the subject of love). Anyway, as Pastor Phillip was talking about how God loves us; how God never leaves us; and how in those moments when we think He's disappeared, all we have to do is turn around a look and He's there, I started thinking.


When I was young, and attending a private Lutheran school, we were told similar things - like that Jesus was always with us. My school life was not the happiest thing - that's actually putting it quite mildly - and I can remember in first or second grade sitting at my desk and picturing Jesus being beside me, because if he was beside me, then I wasn't really alone. Somewhere along the path to life that image got lost in the weight of feeling all alone for a long time.


But what actually strikes me about it is I had no problem imagining Jesus always being with me. He was cool, amazing, and very clearly (from what I was learning at school and in church - and later on my own) loving. He epitomized selfless love.

In rather sharp contrast to that, the idea of God, the Father, always being there...that I had a harder time with, but I didn't know how to express that. I just knew from the time I was very young until adulthood whenever someone would try to encourage me to not be sad about my lack of an "earthly" father in my life because I had such a wonderful "heavenly" Father, I would get very angry. It became like an instantaneous button for me. Angry and then sad and kinda hurt.


It wasn't until high school that I began to look at God like a "parent". I had a parent - a wonderful mother - so I could handle that label. And I liked it. And it allowed me to grow closer to Him and to be open to that. But somewhere in the midst of early adulthood, all those issues with "father" came creeping back.


As an adult, I realized what caused such terrible feelings in me when very well-meaning people tried to explain the idea of God as a father to me. The word "father" didn't mean anything to me. And when I say that, I mean it was really and truly devoid of meaning; empty. I had nothing - no expectations - to attach to that word, so I had never learned how to view God as a Father who loves & provides for His children because I had no reality to put with that.


This is something I've been working out over the last couple of years actually. Slowly learning to trust. Learning to let go. Learning to believe I do know His voice (and no I don't mean that in a little voices in your head kind of way / call the men in the white coats kind of way). Some things are very difficult to express in writing actually...


I still have a lot to learn. But I know an awfully large number of girls, like me, who had their hearts broken by either an absent father or one who showed them nothing resembling love. And who, also like me, haven't found peace with letting God father them. It really is a great thing I gotta tell ya. Seriously. But it's a process. A huge process. One that involves letting go of a lot. And trusting. Trusting is a whole other blog. Oy.

Tonight however I have two things I'm pondering. The first is 1 Corinthians 13:1-8 which is "...If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails."

The second is (shorter!) Romans 8:38-39 "For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is Christ Jesus our Lord."

Think about that. Love as described in 1 Corinthians is (I believe) described in its perfect state - in the way that God loves us and how we should strive to love one another. It's an amazing, powerful love. And then the idea that nothing can separate us from God's love - His perfect love. Nothing we do. Not the way other people see us or have treated us or made us feel. He loves us. Period.

And granted that is why He shows us both grace and mercy. And within His grace we are called to belong to Him, to be His children. No matter how we got here, or how either of our parents treated us (either - if you have mom issues or dad issues or neither), or how friends, boy/girlfriends, lovers, husbands, wives, exes, family, etc. have made us feel - He loves us just the way we are.

Just a thought.

-Lisa

Currently Listening to the Soundtrack to Memoirs of a Geisha