Retrospective Sensemaking

I am beginning to understand more and more that a relationship with God is not about short-term happiness, and is not about just “fixing problems.” In other words, this life is bigger, more complete, than making us temporarily comfortable. In fact, it may be that the closer you get to God, the more pain you are available for, meaning that you become more and more uncomfortable as you realize that “sacrifice” means experiencing the totality of this world. Perhaps pain is the point, and this is to say that through opening a conduit to God, you are subject to His plan, which is often uncomfortably painful. This lesson is difficult.

My son was 2 when I first wrote this, and now he is approaching 3.

I imagine that God loves me like I love Ethan. If Ethan does wrong, one option is to ignore it, making sure that he feels comfortable regardless of his actions and intent. Or I can correct him. The former is easier for he and I, but this is not the way to truly love him, right? Ignoring his wrongdoings will harm him, and so I (and his mother) do what loving parents do, which is correct him, which often means making him feel uncomfortable. This is not easy, but doing less would mean that we love him less than we love our own comfort.

I am experiencing my relationship with God similarly, meaning that I “get” that I walk-about needing correction. My life is nice, they might say, but… pain is so much a part of it all, …as is fear. If allowed, angst an anxiety would rule. But the calling is higher and put into my heart through Christ.

I imagine this: God made me, the individual that loves his son so much that he would allow him to see (and learn from) pain, and so I can’t ignore the obvious: Pain is a part of this story, and God’s love must then be directive.

In “The Problem of Pain” Lewis writes:

“When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some ‘disinterested,’ because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are objects of His Love. 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 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. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator’s eyes. It is certainly a burden of glory not only beyond our deserts but also, expect in rare moments of grace, beyond our desiring; we are inclined, like the maidens in the old play, to deprecate the love of Zeus. But the fact seems unquestionable” (Amazing Love, How can It Be, from Patricia S. Klein’s, “A Year with C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works, p.15) .

What do you think?

A young woman from Cincinnati once said to me: "It is easy to love God because He's faithful."

Thanks, Al.

Get a piece of peace.