God's Love

I was about 13 before I really turned any solid focus or attention on to spiritual and/or religious ideas.  I had been to church here and there, I participated in religious ceremonies like baptisms and weddings, I knew that some of the people around me were Catholics, but faith was not a personal thing for me until I was a teenager.

When I found God it became my immediate desire to know Him more.  What was God like? What was my relationship with God supposed to be like?  Was God in all things or just some things?  What did God require of me?  Why was God interested in me? etc.

There have now been many inexplicable moments in my life where I was in tune with a presence greater than mine that was full of every type of stillness that I can label - awareness, compassion, peace, love.  Once I believed in God, it was a messy start trying to find a way to express and channel that relationship and flow. How do you give back to God?  How do you participate with what God has in store? How do you build a relationship with God?

My glimpse of God is still in part...through a glass, darkly, just as it says in 1 Corinthians 13, but that glimpse has doubled in size since I became a parent.  What is it like for someone's good to always be your priority? How can one be always preoccupied with the well-being of another while being fully occupied with other demands?  How is it that someone's health, their comfort, their joy can paint every moment of life with meaning?  How is it that the immensity of the world's darkness is muted in comparison to the grandeur of love? What is it like to be involved with someone in a way that what happens to them, in essence, happens to you?

She is mine and I am His.  If He loves me half as much as I love her - what a blessing - and yet, He loves me infinitely more.  It is such a great gift to get to participate in parental love.  It is such a great gift to get to see another in the love that He sees us.  How can I be worthy of His love or of getting to love her? And yet, I have the gift of both.

1 Corinthians 13:9-12 For now we know in part, and we prophesy in part.  But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.  When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things.  For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.