God is Love?

God is love.  Seems like a great slogan.  Something we might hold onto without really believing and it somehow having the ability to placebo us into feeling better about life.  God is love.  Hmmm. 

My pastor, Michael Hidalgo, gave a wonderful message this past weekend about how much God loves us.  I must have heard this message more than I have had birthdays.  But I have also heard the following messages about how we need to stand for what we believe in and who we need to vote for.  To be honest I have never fallen for the latter but I've never quite understood the former.  God is love?  I believe that but not with unconditional, perfectly, or purely tacked on it. 

I have always lived a life where love was manipulative.  Love was give and take, with this great rope to play tug-of-war with in the middle.  Love was never wholly giving yourself away to express your deep desire to love another.  Love was about who was smarter and wiser and could believe in and communicate their opposition better to get what they wanted.  And as I have been reading the Bible lately, I'm thinking there is no room for selfish motives.  God has greater plans and he isn't in the business of twisted grace.  God is love.  It gets easier to believe, to wipe away the manipulations and see it glaring in front of you for a moment but then life continues and it goes away again with our plans and intentions.  Until it comes back roaring and pursuing us personally.  God loves me?  An all new question.

Michael has been driving home this point that "God loves us too much to let us stay where we are."  In the past if I heard that I would think that meant I was supposed to work harder to get where God wanted me to be because I'm not good enough yet.  But Michael took it a step further and reminded us that we are not piles of garbage that he sent his son for but we are beautiful beings that he hates seeing destroyed.  Whoa, God loves me?  I don't want to be destroyed either.

After the service I was sitting there thinking about this past....life.  I think about how I have misunderstood God as a father, one who disciplines but does not love.  I think about how when I first believed and knew God's grace but only to begin a journey of being a better me not to get back to the garden.  I think about how if I were a parent I would never want my child to think I only loved them if they were well behaved and without mistakes.  I think about a friend who just recently shared the horror of childhood sexual abuse and how all I wanted for them was to know that they were loved deeply by my husband and I.  I think about how in the middle of handing out the punishment of the Israelites through Jeremiah, God stops and says "But you can still turn back" and how much it must have broken his heart to carry it out.  Yet he gives hope and I think, God loves me.  He loves me too much, in my beautiful mess, to keep me where I am.  For the first time I understand that God is love and that Jesus is Good News.

I wonder how many more people need to hear this and I feel like a new Christian wanting to tell everyone that God loves them.  I don't want to go and evangelize and convince people that God exists.  I am.  You can't dispute the most concrete words ever spoken.  Everyone knows that God exists whether or not they understand it or admit it, at least that is what I believe.  But what if faith just means believing that God loves you?  What if faith is that pure?  Now that my eyes have seen his love is for me I trust him in a whole new way because I know he is a loving father.  God is love.  Unconditionally, purely and perfectly.