And just like that, I'm graduated from G42! But what does one get when they graduate? A tribe of people who'd willingly go to hell and back on your behalf? Yes. World class teachings, greater biblical understanding and even more questions? Absolutely. A certificate of completion? Got it! But all those things are only bonuses. The real impartation is the infinite foundation built by the Trinity over a beautifully deconstructive and wonderfully reconstructive nine months.
Over the next four posts, I'll express each part of this transformative foundation:
Be loved by God.
Love Him back.
Love yourself.
Love others.
BE LOVED BY GOD
What’s it like to be Loved by God? To be loved. To be his Beloved.
Honestly, I wish I could tell you. But if I tried to explain, I’d also need words, verbs and notions to ascertain what it’s like for the earth to feel the pulsating rain. I’d have to tell you what the bottom of the ocean floor feels like between my toes and what one may expect to encounter at the cliffs edge of an infinitely expanding cosmos.
See, He’s told me over and over again to ‘just receive’ but if you stand under Niagara Falls hoping to come out with a glass of water, you’re going to get a whole lot more than you bargained for. God’s love, try as I might, can never - will never - be fully described.
To be loved. By God. He who loves because he loves because he loves because He is Love because He is himself complete and whole. To be, with each breath, the pinnacle, culmination, vibrating, reverberating center of the center eye of the bull, never missed by Trinity’s faithful shot. It’s the sweetest of honey, sticky on your lips. Or choosing love and leaning into your very last first kiss.
What’s it like to be loved by God? If I had the words to give an answer, I’d also explain to you what it was like for me to take my very first breath, straight from the womb. After all, that is where it all commences, Him giving you life so that He can love you. You know, if we had forever and a day, I’d write metaphors and analogies, paint pictures and craft one million soliloquies but they’d all just be echoes of experiencing the real thing.
Being loved by the creator of the universe and everything in it. If I knew how to describe it, I’d also paraphrase the magic of sipping on sunlight and deep red wine. And when our sun friend departs to make room for the stars, I’d introduce you to all of them, one by one, name by name. And while I was at it, I’d go ahead and sum up the meaning of existence.
Far be it from me to try and define what it feels like to be loved by the Divine. It would be like defining the exact feeling of locking eyes with the one who declares, “out of 7.6 billion people, I choose you over and over. And darling, come hell or high water, I’m simply not leaving.” If you want to take a shot at it, be my guess but it seems it would be easier to splatter a canvas with the infinite hues of human or capture the wind in a butterfly net. No words hold up the weight of explanation, except the Word himself as he literally stood in the flesh, dwelling with us.
If I could tell you what it is like to be loved by God, I would describe the feeling in the room when Jesus tore the bread in two or what the wine tasted like in the upper room. I would articulate the thoughts in Jesus’ mind as he allowed his body to gift wrapped in blood, arms stretched wide as a symbol of love. But I wouldn’t stop there, because neither did He. I would capture the moment His eyes opened back up, that is if I was trying tell you what it feels like to be loved.