Confession

God has so many ways of saying “I love you”. I didn’t know He sometimes says it through the warm sunny afternoon of a season half way between summer and autumn – gentle sunray and a cool breeze, leaves still green and refreshing but with hints of yellow and orange, or through the cozy warmth of a well heated room on a cold rainy day.

Sometimes through magnificent things that happen in life, like achieving life long goals, meeting the love of your life, having your first child and many others.

I struggled to know for a while in my early twenties, how you could possibly say I love you in times of hardship and adversity. 

Now, I dare say, I’m beginning to see how you might. To start off at the periphery – and in my opinion these are of peripheral significance – are ideas such as “everything happens for a reason” or “there is a lesson in every hardship”. It’s a utilitarian view. And since you are the master of efficiency, I’m sure you are not indifferent to the ways in which you might employ hardship for a later  good which will be of practical use in this world. But you are not a cold God who prioritises running philosophical calculus of maximising good for the sake of it, although I don’t doubt your absolute capability, and right to do those things. 

Second, hardships might serve as an opportunity for us to get to know Jesus better. If we know him better, we can love him more deeply.

Thirdly and I think this is the more important, hardships draw us closer to you and you come very near to us. In the process we learn to be with you. We learn to rely on you. we learn to pray to you. An important thing in hardships is that we come to realise, that you are with us in the hardship. You are with our suffering. You know our suffering like it is your own because you have suffered for us in all aspects that we might have suffered and will suffer. 

If a friend knows my suffering, and understands it, than they know more about me than anyone who knows anything else about me. In that way my God, you are my friend. The friend that I need and want.

As I sit here on this bench under a tree, on a warm, pleasant, sunny afternoon, I feel your love. I feel privileged to be living this life. Being alive is fundamentally a privilege though sometimes I am deeply compelled to challenge that belief and I often do. But I feel that it’s not the nice weather that is the source of this love I feel. The source comes from inside of me, and inside of me lives Christ, very alive and very real. Through him, I am able to see the ways in which the things and the ways of the world reflect your love. And sometimes, and sometimes more importantly, the ways in which the world does not reflect your love.

The point is, and it took a while to come to this point which is that I feel that you love me. And that is the true source of my sense of privilege. And to be honest, words can’t describe the waves of gratitude that roars and thunders in my heart. Sometimes, I feel like my heart is going to burst. Tears have certainly welled up because of that. But the point is, that God, I love you. I love you, despite my shortcomings, and I know you love me too.