You asked for a loving God; you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the “lord of terrible aspect,” is present; not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes.
~C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)
Oh beloved, can we see it? God Loves us completely.
But, there is more.
In the same way that a father loves his child – and that child cannot of his own accord add any value to the relationship; yet that same child makes his own father the richest of men – we make God more rich.
Said more simply: Not only does God like us, we make Him happy.
He then pours this more than infinite Love back onto us, that we might Love Him back all the more. This Love is cleansing and purifying. Sometimes it is so intense that it even hurts in its cleaning actions. Regardless of the pain, it is most surely Love.
We make God’s Life better. Oh, for sure, He does not need us. But even so, He is enriched by our existence and relationship with Him. We add value to the Infinite.
This makes us infinitely valuable. A treasured possession.
A people for whom God showed we were worth dying.
Oh my.
Yeah, this is kind of a big deal. Like, what is going on here?
This a kind of Love affair that is making eternity and even better place. This kind of Love implies a level of intimacy that goes beyond intimacy. It implies that His Life in us, and our lives in Him, are not some cosmic partnership wherein we trade favors in some zero sum game. No, there is no longer any Him and i.
There is only us. There is only we.
