Lectio
“I saw that He is to us everything that is good and comfortable for us: He is our clothing that for love wrappeth us, claspeth us, and all encloseth us for tender love, that He may never leave us; being to us all-thing that is good, as to mine understanding.”
— Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
Meditatio
Although we sometimes fear God for what we imagine God will do to us if we do not obey Him, if it is true that God is love, true fear of God is the fear of who we would be and what we would become without Him. It is to know that all that is good in us, all that is moral, righteous, and holy is His, not ours. And it is to know that His love sustains us, even in our disobedience, rebellion, and rejection of that very love, and that His love for us precedes our sin, endures through it, and extends beyond it into eternity.
Faced with the truth of our sinfulness, the depth of our brokenness, and our utter powerlessness to change ourselves for the good without habitual relapse into evil, we are left in despair. But once we realize that none of this — absolutely none of it — changes God’s love for us, our despair turns to contrition and surrender. And from this posture of surrender, our fear is not of what God will do to us for what we have done and who we are, but the fear of being so wounded that we are incapable of accepting or receiving the fullness of His love. It is the fear that even God’s love cannot or will not change us to make us worthy of God.
But God’s love has already done this. The cross has already done this. Through Christ and His sacrifice for us, we are made worthy of God, not because some thought, word, or deed on our part has redeemed us or earned us His grace and mercy, but because, through Christ, we are joined to God’s grace and mercy in spite of our irredeemability and our inability to think, speak, or act in any way that could ever right our wrongs. Through Christ, our sins are forgiven and, through Christ, we receive the gift that is already given. Our fear, then, should not be of not earning God’s love, but of not accepting God’s love.
The God who is everything good and comfortable for us, who is the clothing that wraps, clasps, and encloses us in tender love, who will never leave us, and who is all good things for and in us, does not require our fear, but asks for our love. What we are right to fear, however, is that our love is not enough because, in all of the ways that we withhold, reject, or deny love, it is not. And so we remain to pray to the God of love that we love as He loves, and that our love become as His love — steadfast, outpouring, and unconditional — because without Him it is not, but with Him, all things are possible. With Him, all love is possible.
Oratio
Not The Way
Lord I need all of You
all of me is not enough
I cannot see the way forward
my ways are not The Way
I cannot imagine life without You
nor can I do this of my power
only through Christ
am I made whole
only through Him
do my wounds make any sense
the Cross is my salvation
the Son my redemption
the Resurrection my hope
without You Lord
I am lost
Contemplatio
Whatever wound in you fears it cannot receive love — bring it here, wordlessly. You are not asked to make yourself worthy, only to stop refusing what is already yours. Rest here a while longer, offering no resistance to His presence, and let Him do with you what only He can do.
Related Scripture
“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.”
— 1 John 4:18 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Not Perfect, Not Okay, But Loved: On God’s Unconditional Love and the Gift We Cannot Earn, which meets the same truth from another angle — not a wound afraid to be received, but a self that has stopped trying to be perfect and found itself loved anyway.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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