Loving God spurs me on to love people, but it also ignites me to love things. It's like falling in love. Suddenly, all the world is warm and cozy and rose-tinted. Food is more delicious. Music is more moving. And things and activities of all sorts take on a different dimension and are filled with a deep pleasure. It is as if falling in love is the human-to-human parallel of having a relationship with God. Is it any wonder then, that all the world wants to fall in love?
I think, not everyone gets to deepen and savor the feelings of happiness that being with God brings. A lot of us are born, feeling unloved and unlovely. It takes a while to figure out that what God desires from us is not what we can do, not what we can achieve, not what we own and not who we can save, but us ourselves. I often think that this is so important to God that He embedded it into the way He designed babies, so that we will have a constant reminder.
Many baby animals are born with the ability to walk and run (or swim, as may be the case). But human babies are born half-blind and immobile. It will take years and years and years before we can perform even the most basic actions of walking, running, eating on our own, cleaning up after ourselves and getting our own food. If left on our own at birth, we will most certainly die.
Mysteriously, it is at this stage that a parent's instinct to love, protect and provide a child is especially deep and especially strong. The baby can do nothing and give nothing back. The parent must sacrifice much to keep up with the needs of the child. Yet a deep, overwhelming something wells up from our innermost being to balance off the pressure of sacrifice: passion, desire, love and deep stirrings in the spirit. I see this as a pale reflection of what God constantly feels towards us.
It is curious that the first thing we feel inclined to do when we meet a baby is to try and elicit a smile from them. When the baby makes eye contact and gives a toothless little grin or a little chuckle, we feel so happy. It's the weirdest thing. Could it be that is what God desires from us in "worship"? Eye contact and a chuckle? That thought makes me laugh and I feel God laughing along with me.
On my best days, the world is filled with a warm, cozy pleasure. Everything is alive and beautiful, and every person is amazing and wonderful. I think it is very important to be able to shed the unhappiness of yesterday like a snake sheds its skin or like a butterfly breaking out and leaving its cocoon. Yesterday's tragedies and unhappiness cannot contain the glory of the person God designed for me to become. If I ever want to attain the fullness of that glory, of that joy, I need to be able to break out of the seductive lures of past unhappiness. I think God helps us by giving us a short memory. As long as we don't keep revisiting the traumatic event, rehearsing its every painful detail, it gets washed away in the rapid flow of time and its after-effects is bleached to a clean, beautiful, fragrant white, as if by the sun. (Sheets blowing in the sun. Blue skies, green grass)
I feel like that is how it is with my life. Everyone has their own share of sorrow, their own share of tragedies, of Lemony Snickets type of series of unfortunate events. Everyone snubs their own toe at some point or have someone step on their foot or have some other equally random and painful event happen to them. We all get the chance to practice forgiving, forgetting and letting go.
Whenever I forgive someone, I remind myself that I am not doing it for their sake, but for my own. I don't want to spend any more time being unhappy than I already have. Time is a precious commodity that flows like water. It either turns one way or the other. I can turn that river into the tunnels of memory, spending time reliving every moment of a traumatic event, every detail of an argument, every insult I would like to hurl at my "enemy". Or I can direct that river down a sun-filled canal, spending it with people I actually like (like an author, a musician, a friend or my dogs), doing something I really enjoy. Like I always say, "The best revenge is to be happy".
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