Touching the heart of God

It’s a cloudy day in the neighborhood. The sun is playing hide and seek, birds are singing with vigor and Philips’s Mountain is shining in the distance. The wind kicks up and the dogs run wild with glee, chasing bunnies that are really just tumbleweed bags blowing across the field. It is a promising beginning.

Whenever I hear birds like this, I think of the garden of Eden. How glorious the bird song must have been. It was a promising beginning as well, and we know how that turned out. 

I’ve been reading C. S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed. In the forward, his stepson, Douglas Gresham says “all human relationships end in pain-it is the price that our imperfection has allowed Satan to exact from us for the privilege of love.”

I’ve been pondering this and today in my own Eden of sorts, I think I see. 

When humans love, it is a glimpse, however imperfect, of God’s love. But our tendency to sin, to do things our own way instead of God’s way, has a price tag; that price tag is separation from God or death. And we live this out in our love relationships when death comes. The painful tearing of the sacred was not part of God’s original design but because of our imperfection, it is our reality. 

But wait there is more, God says! It is, also, a peek into what belief, what our amazing God offers us: a completeness of love that is never torn away.

In a way, the pain of loss points me directly to what, to Whom, I long for most: the neverending love of God.  To grieve is to touch the very heart of God.

My grief is inexorably connected to my deepest longings: to love and be loved; to belong and offer belonging.

My grief can have positive purpose. 

Now that is a good beginning.

Anne
March 23, 2021