What is God?

While I was home over break, I got to spend some time with my friend Katy, her husband Joe, and their baby John. I think John is one of the cutest babies I've ever known, though I might be a bit biased because he really likes me, and isn't it really easy to have a good deal of fondness for someone who has a good deal of fondness for you?

Well, whatever the case, he is a cute little guy, and he's gotten to a stage where he's learning to use language. He's speaking words, putting together sentences, asking questions. It's such an exciting thing to see this small child learning to express himself, and it's fun to try to understand what he's saying in his own language and to see him learning the language of adults.

He's a really sweet child too, and, when his mom gives him his dinner he says, "Thank you mommy cooking." I think of how wonderful it must be to see your child expressing gratitude, beginning to understand how to verbalize his appreciation and love for the things you do. I know it made me feel good to know that, when I left, John began saying, "Need Sara." It's nice to know you are loved and missed.

Over the last few months, I've been giving a lot of thought to what it is to have a relationship with God, how one goes about doing that. For so long, I have thought of religion as a list of do's and dont's, with a big emphasis on the don't. But I never really thought about God in that list, save for the part where he sends you to hell for doing all the things on the "don't" part of the list.

In a way, my thoughts about religion had very little to do with God and very much to do with rules. And, the thing is, it was very difficult to think about having a relationship with God when I thought about God as a list of rules, when I thought of God solely as someone who was waiting to catch me slipping up so that He could punish me.

It's true that I believe in the rules and I believe in punishment. But, I kept thinking that there must be something more, there must be something to inspire a deep and transformative love in those who believe in Christ, that there must be a depth of love which would cause me to not even want to sin. I often pray that I can better understand love. In fact, I sometimes even pray that I will learn to love people and see people as God sees them.

I've said before that you have to be very careful about what you pray for because you often get it; unfortunately I haven't been practicing what I preach. And the result of those prayers has been catching up with me. This is a side effect of praying to a God who hears and answers our prayers. Lately, I have been growing in an understanding of love, of the kind of love that God must have for us, and I must admit that I don't think that as humans we will ever understand the depth of love that God has for us.

We often live our lives concentrating on the negative things we've done, said, thought. Those sins we've confessed a hundred times, those very sins that are now as far as the East is from the West, still haunt us and keep us from understanding the truth that Christ died for us while we were still sinners. Greater love hath no man, than that a man lay down his life for a friend. And that is the kind of love He has for us. I'm just not sure it's the kind of love we can fully comprehend.

And yet, when I look around, I see the things God uses to show us small glimpses of His love here on earth. He uses us in ways more beautiful than we can imagine. In the simplest exchanges of every day--in the baby's words to his mom, in the kindness of a nurse at the doctor's office, in the unexpected words of kindness that touch us so deeply that we feel them in our hearts and souls--God gives us opportunities to experience His love.

And, though we so often feel that God must be looking down on us in scorn, I think we must remember that God is love, that He loves us no matter our failings, that He loves me no more than the person sitting next to me on the bus. And I have to thing that the God who delights over us and rejoices over us with singing must surely be filled with love when He witnesses those small kindnesses we show one another.

Like one seeing His child grow in love for others, God must take great satisfaction and delight as we grow in love for Him and for our neighbor. And maybe by learning to look at ourselves and those around us as God does, we can begin to understand a love for which there is no end.