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Tough love
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Tuesday of the Second Week of Lent
Psalm 50:17-21
God says, “You hate discipline and cast my words behind you. When you do these things shall I be deaf to it? Or do you think that I am like yourself? I will correct you by drawing them up before your eyes.”
I remember being a little kid and putting my hands over my ears and squinting my eyes as tight shut as they could be. I learned to bite my lips and be silent too. Those three monkeys See No, Hear No, Speak No had nothing on me.
God draws my words up before my shut up eyes. But eventually I’ll have to open them. Who will last the longest, God or me? I guess I know the answer to that question!
God’s patience never ends. I expect, from my experience with myself and other people, that what will happen is I’ll finally get my ears boxed and God will pry open my eyes.  “Look at me when I’m talking to you!”  “Look at me!”
But no. God waits for me to look at him when I’m ready. There’s something so courteous about God’s way, something so gentle. And still he gets the work done.
God loves me without condition. That is terrifying. There is nothing I can do to make things better between us. I am only myself to God, and he doesn’t need anything from me.
I must either live in that spacious freedom with joy, or pretend it’s not so spacious after all and decorate myself up to impress him, or scrunch in the corner and get smaller and smaller and hope to be invisible to this scary God.
God will never resign himself to the way I attach myself to his gifts as if they were what I need. He only wants me, and insists that I only want him. None of this “grass blade” called the world is mine; it’s his. One night St. Francis asked his friars to attend a wedding, the wedding between Francis and absolute poverty. He was desperate to know God without stint or ceasing. Only God, and not the gifts of God.
No wonder the birds loved him, and the wolf, and the flowers, and Brother Sun, and Sister Moon. He loved them not as gifts, but as fellow “children” of God.
Earlier in Psalm 50 God says, “Were I hungry, I would not tell you, for mine is the world and all that fills it.” God desires mercy, not sacrifice. He’s already full. And he loves us into that fullness day after day after day.
Lord, I feel full too, to the brim. But the measure with which I give is the measure with which I receive. There is so much space in me filled with your gifts and not with you. But you long to press yourself down, shaken together, and pour out of my life in prodigal abundance. And you will never ever end that longing, or leave me alone. When I am empty, I am full. When I am weak, I am strong.
http://www.christiancounselingservice.com/archived_devotions.php?article_id=1247
