GOD LOVES ME —Interpreting that love through the years

This past month I was encouraged to reflect on a basic tenet of my faith—that God is love, and to pray and ponder how I have interpreted God’s love for me throughout my life. My felt experience of God’s love, if you will. I see this as a worthy endeavor, one we all might benefit from—interpreting God’s love in our past and present circumstances. So, I encourage you to consider doing this as perhaps a part of living out your Easter season of joy and new life. May God show each of us the true interpretation of His love for us, and grace us with new ways to look at our lives through God’s eyes and heart.

For me, this time of reflection has been particularly meaningful because I recently celebrated 35 years of continual sobriety. As a 70-year-old, that means that half of my life has been lived in recovery. The 12-step program has definitely marked my life, and led me on a path to a deepening faith. I see this as one significant way that God has loved me through the years. Next month, my husband and I will celebrate our 30^th wedding anniversary. It is a second marriage for both of us and we met in recovery. Our story is one of God’s grace and mercy and power to bring light from darkness. This is another powerful example of God’s love for me through the years. Hopefully, these examples from my life will stimulate your own reflections.

As we review our lives, I pray we realize how God has loved us into existence, and sustains us in love. We can pray that God give us concrete examples of how He has lovingly carried us through the peaks and valleys each life brings. Because of God and how God has loved us first, all things are possible for us. God’s love in us naturally overflows into the world we inhabit and into every part of our lives. Little by little, we are able to find God in all things.

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”—Gerald Manley Hopkins.

Attentive to God’s presence everywhere and recognizing God’s generosity to us, we naturally want to return the favor by praising, loving, and serving God and helping others. *

“I ask for interior knowledge of all the great good I have received, in order that, stirred to profound gratitude, I may become able to love and serve the Divine Majesty in all things.”
St. Ignatius, The Spiritual Exercises

The idea that the role of committed Christians is always to grow richer themselves so that they can give richly to others holds great appeal to me. I’m keenly aware that the Lord has preserved my life from destruction again and again, for which I am deeply grateful. Through the years, I have grown in my awareness that I am held by Love, embraced by God’s loving kindness. I want to start each day saying: “My heart is ready, O God.”, and live out the day alert, immersed, and enshrouded in the arms of my God. I fall very short of this ideal, yet I pray God is pleased with my desire to follow Him and His ways unreservedly. I believe God desires to show each of us the depths of His loving mercy for us. Just as we see in the springtime, God wants to see new buds blooming in each of us.

May we all rise to newness of life this Easter season and be ready to live A LIFE LIT UP when Pentecost arrives. Let’s listen for the voice of God everywhere in life, especially in one another and in the here and now.

Source of all life,
Raise us to new life.

Let’s pray for each other as we take this journey to explore God’s loving ways throughout our lives. May we see just how potent God’s grace has been, is, and will be.

Then, as we look towards the future, we can ask ourselves: What am I hoping that the Lord will do for me now? What do I think God is hoping that I will do for Him?

*Inspired by The Ignatian Adventure, Kevin O’Brien, SJ

In honor of Pentecost, I’m including this prayer to the Holy Spirit:

Come, Holy Spirit
Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts
of your faithful and enkindle
in them the fire of your love.
Send forth your Spirit and they
shall be created and you shall
renew the face of the earth.
O God, who has instructed the
hearts of your faithful by
the light of the Holy Spirit,
grant that by the same Holy Spirit
we may have a right judgement in all things,
and evermore rejoice in His consolations.
Through Christ Our Lord. Amen

Photo credit: Cathy Raney, Hot Springs Village, Arkansas