KINGSVIEW

SHIVERING TOWARD THE LOVE OF GOD

Michael A. King

For half my life I’ve known this friend, but never had I experienced him quite like at that breakfast. I had expected him to be stressed and maybe even fragile, because he’d been laid off after having some hope that a new position within the organization would be found. Last I’d heard he’d managed to piece together only a bit of this and that. Who I actually met startled me. He was stronger, clearer, more energized than I could remember ever experiencing in the decades I’d known him.

I was awed and mystified. What had happened? How—precisely when it would be normal for him to be broken—had he found whatever he had found?

At the time I didn’t tell him how puzzled I was, but it turned out I didn’t need to, because he answered my question regarding how he had come to be like this even without my asking it aloud. This is what he told me. He said that one day up on Skyline Drive in the Shenandoah Valley, as the sun was rising, its rays seemed to become the very presence of God. And he heard within the experience a voice, nearly as clearly as if the voice were speaking aloud to him, telling him that he was loved. I love you, God was telling him.

Well, all right, cool, Jesus loves me this I know. God is love. The love of God is greater far than tongue or pen can ever tell. So big deal, a voice says God loves you. Yes, neat, not to be dismissed, but hey, it’s great also that when you draw in each breath there’s oxygen there to keep you alive, but that doesn’t mean you start looking clear and strong and energized just because one day it hits you that there’s oxygen in this air and what a great thing that is.

So I was still trying to get a handle on what was up. So God had told my friend he loved him. So?

What I finally gathered was this: My friend had thrown back at God all the little and big sins and foibles and frailties he well knew he still struggled with, Christian most of his life or not.

And God had said, basically, "Don’t care. That’s not what I’m concerned about. You don’t have to get it all right for me to love you. We can worry about how you’re not perfect another day, but that won’t change what I’m telling you now, which is just plain that I love you, that’s that, and you don’t have to do anything except hear it and know it and feel it."

That is what had changed my friend. God had loved him before; he’d known that before; but now he felt it in some fresh new deep down way that just soaked into him through and through.

It was so in him, in fact, that for days after I’d find my mind turning to it and wondering if it could actually be that God loved me too like that. Because I know it in my head, but not always in my heart, in my bones, in my stomach or wherever the feelings come from that don’t always seem to care too much what I know in my head. I believe God does love us like that, but I’m still finding my way toward feeling it.

Soon after my friend told me his story I was standing on a bridge over the Perkiomen Creek under one of the most brilliant blue skies I ever remember seeing. The air was as shiveringly beautiful as it gets, there in a pristine autumn day, and the sun glowed through it and onto shimmering leaves in such a way that it really did seem as if God himself was aiming to be seen and touched and loved in the glories of that moment.

Just then I sort of idly wondered what it would be like to actually believe that the love of God was like that and that it was a love that wanted to enfold me as much as my friend. Oh what a vision. But even though I could think it, I could only hold on to it for a few instants. I didn’t quite know how to live all the way into trusting it.

Still, what if what my friend heard God say that day is true? What if God’s love really is greater far than tongue or pen can tell? That’s what I’m shivering toward trusting and feeling.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is pastor, Spring Mount (Pa.) Mennonite Church, and editor, DreamSeeker Magazine.