How Much We Are Loved

You, Lord, are forgiving and good, abounding in love to all who call to you. (Psalm 86:5)

And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” (Exodus 34:6-7)

I suspect I’m cycling through a very small number of verses. I know I’ve written about the passage from Exodus before, but David repeated it in the psalm, and it doesn’t get more basic than what we believe about God. So, do you believe that God is forgiving? Do you believe that He’s good? Do you believe that He is abounding – abounding – in love toward you? Unless you don’t believe He exists, or you’re depressed, facing a major dark night of the soul, or have major self-image problems, you’ll say “Yes, of course.” It’s the good Sunday School answer. It saves face. It doesn’t require vulnerability and doesn’t show weakness. But are you living in awareness of that love right now?

There are other psalms in which David effective asks God what He has against him, so we know that our feelings of being loved by God aren’t constant. That doesn’t mean His love isn’t constant, but that our agreement that what He’s doing is loving isn’t.

One of the things that I think I’m learning is that we don’t tend to see love in the present tense. There’s too much noise in the world. When I left Erie to come to Florida last fall, I had the sense of being blessed. It was a good spring and summer. But I also know that going through it, I didn’t feel loved very often. X, Y, and Z didn’t happen when I wanted them to, or did happen when I didn’t want them to. But looking back, I could see it. The spring and summer of 2020 were great. God’s love was abounding.

In the same way, as I look at the fall and winter in Florida, it has been hard. It hasn’t been what I wanted it to be. And all the work I’ve done in weeding, by the end of April you won’t be able to tell. And yet, I suspect that when I get back north, I will look back on the past six months and say that God has loved me. Even now, things come to mind – mistakes made that came out OK, work done that feels fulfilling, progress toward making Grace Cottage South what I need it to be – that speak of His love and care.

I suspect this need for 20/20 hindsight is true of our love for one another, too. We don’t tend to understand the love our parents give us until we’ve grown up and can look back. It may even require that they be gone from our lives because when we’re caught up in the chains of now, we can’t get far enough away to look at it clearly. Things we overlook as trivial may become cherished memories of how much we were loved, or how much we loved.