I sit on the sofa in the light of the lamp, and I pray through 1 Corinthians 13—you know, the famous love chapter that’s read at a lot of weddings. I tend not to like this chapter of the Bible. It always feels like an indictment of how far short of love I fall each day, each hour of each day.
But tonight, a reversal. An epiphany: this passage is not about me at all. It’s about God.
For if God is love (and the Apostle John assures me this is so), I can substitute the word God for the word love in this passage…in which case it reads:
God is patient. God is kind…God is not easily angered, God keeps no record of wrongs. God does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. God always protects…always hopes, always perseveres. God never fails.”
God is love. Love for me. Love for you.
I confess I have this angry God image in my mind, in my heart. God seems to be watching me through narrowed eyes, waiting for me to mess up so he can pounce on me. God, in my knee-jerk reaction to myself and my sin, is like a cosmic Mrs. Moore, my sharp-tongued junior high clarinet teacher from whom I literally hid in fear, crouching behind the sheet music stacks in the store where she conducted her lessons so she would not see me and call me in to her little cell of a classroom.
But God, if 1 Corinthians 13 is to be trusted, is not like that at all. God is kind. God is not easily angered. God keeps no record of wrongs. God is not like Mrs. Moore. God is more like Miss McCreight, my elementary music teacher who did not dwell on all my squeaks and wrong notes, seeing that I was frustrated and embarrassed by them, by my inability to play well. Instead, she gently corrected me when I consistently misplayed a note and noticed with a smile or a word of praise when I hit the right ones.
Like Miss McCreight, God delights in goodness. God delights in me. As Zephaniah says, God rejoices over me with singing.
As I wrote those words above, about God’s love, Ben came out of his bedroom—he was crying; he’d had a bad dream—and crawled into my lap and now he sits, leaning against my chest, a living picture of how I can approach God—with confidence in his love, with assurance of his kindness, with trust that he will hold me and be glad that I have come to be held.
Oh, how beautiful this is. Thank you for sharing it!
Thanks for stopping by, Natasha, and letting me know you were here. It’s nice to meet you 🙂
Thank you for writing this today. It really ministered to my heart.
With Father’s Day coming up, I have been thinking about how God loves us just because we were born of him, not for any other reason. Your post resonates deeply and with truth and power.
bless you,
Susan
Susan, Thanks for stopping by. I’m so glad my words touched you. God’s certainly been working to replace my God-as-angry-ogre image with one that is truer to His loving character.
Sarah Clarkson wrote this on her blog yesterday, and oh how it resonates:
“When I struggled so deeply with a fear of God’s anger, I realized one day that my concept of God’s anger was modeled on the anger I felt myself. And since my anger is rarely righteous, almost never fully justified, and generally vindictive (even if unexpressed), I considered God’s anger to be the same. But of course, it’s not. How could it ever be? How could God, a self-giving Trinity whose very being is a circle of ceaselessly-given love be angry in the isolated outrage of a fallen human being?”
I loved this SO much, Kimberly. So much. Thank you for this. I will be re-reading that scripture again with God in place of love. Bless you, sweet friend. You’re in my prayers.
Thanks, Kris. I think God is laughing at me, in a gentle sort of way: when I wrote the post I thought it was so trite and ridiculous. (I feel that way about most of the posts that hit pretty close to home, especially when they’re saying something I’ve known–or am supposed to have known–my whole life.) And here you resonated with it so much you shared it with your friends 🙂 (Thanks for that, too, by the way!)
Kimberly, I too read Sarah Clarkson’s post and saw myself in her words, and today I saw myself in yours. I have lost so many years to fearing God’s anger and disapproval of me, and then this morning I hear this in my head: “God is FOR you”. Just that simple, “trite” somewhat obvious statement, and yet I haven’t really believed that until just this week! How crazy is that?! Hey, God is FOR us!! 😀 bless you, sweet friend!