What does it really mean to more fully understand God's love? I grew up being told that the purpose in life is "to live for the glory of God." But if someone were to ask me today what the purpose is, I would probably add "to learn to realize more and more everyday just how much God loves us." As a young child (both literally as I refer back to the day when I still carried around an American Girl doll and metaphorically speaking as I still am a young child of faith as we are all this side of heaven), I understood I was made in God's glory by Him and for Him but the implications of this didn't easily translate into other ways of knowing and understanding of and reflecting on what it really means besides the obvious -obedience.
Learning to love other people more and more selflessly is how we become more fully aware of just how much God loves us. Learning to love while forgetting yourself in the process is the essence of sanctification. Thankfulness lies at the heart of it. The Garden legacy, that Eden bite of fruit, the catalyst for all our sins was really the sin of ingratitude. Adam and Eve would not have sinned if they were completely satisfied with everything God had already given them in the Garden of Eden. We constantly fail to see the material world for what it is meant to be: as the means to communion with God.
For forty years the Israelites ate the mysterious substance of manna -a name which literally means "What is it?" They ate mystery. Their daily nourishment came from that which they did not understand. I held a four week old baby dying of AIDS this summer. Cancer and mental illness have unapologetically made themselves a part of my family. Two days after my visit to the central garbage dump in Guatemala City several hundred people die as it collapses into a major sinkhole -this was their home, their livelihood, and now their grave. We eat mysteries everyday. But how do we eat these mysteries in closer communion with God...giving up guilt and resentment and allowing bereavement and righteous anger to pave a way for greater gratitude and exceeding joy?
I have both seen and experienced great pain and I now I am beginning to realize more and more how I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks. "Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn't rescue the suffering" (One Thousand Gifts, Voskamp, p. 58).
I like this quote by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin a lot -"Nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see."
The next quote is a bit provocative but I believe its beauty and truth overpowers its provocativeness so I take the risk: "The unit of wine is the cup. Of love, the unit is the kiss. That's here. In Hell, the units are the gallon and the fuck. In Paradise, the drop and the glance."
I can't wait to be filled completely with God's glory again but for now I must learn to more fully understand how all of life is grace. Every breath's a battle between grudgery and gratitude....and the more we embrace a heart of gratitude, the more we embrace God's love.
