Walking the other day was… different and after reading the first section of ‘Eat Pray Love’ there is a frustrated energy that has taken me up. Is this the spirit of God? Can I start calling these anxious fierce passionate bewilderments the very animation of God among a people? There are moments while walking when I have experienced the loving presence of God in a way so concretely. Like the air was thick and heavy with love as if I could cut it with a butter knife.
When I was 18 my dad threw the book ‘Abba Child’ on my bed saying he thought I should read it. I was leaving that weekend like I am in a few days to be in the woods. I had just been out for months and now I was going back-but I was scared.
You see I needed to figure things out. I needed to pray and then I needed God to answer with definitive statements like: left, right, yes, no… or do this, but not that. And so I was looking to this book dad had given me to be the prophetic word I was looking for. I read it the first day. The air was still but not heavy and my face mirrored the disposition of my heart. I was tired-tired of feeling toward a certain person and tired of caring on a whole. I wanted life but I was numb-numb to beauty and numb to the pain I’d been swimming in. It was a flood and I was about ready to surrender to the depths. A day after the book had been put away and while silence was consuming it hit me with a force that was more powerful than any human mechanism. ‘Of course’- I thought… ‘My name -David.’
YOU ARE LOVED
By the one who laid these beaches against the trees holding the waters back. The one who with all his self opened his arms to embrace us all while being nailed to a tree he created. Not one tear dropped from my eyes, rather a deep laughter arose as I thought how God seemed to work-or not work. He simply doesn’t relate outside of love-his very essence. He invites us into being… BeLoved. It is a way of being in the world that is… different than all other ways. To be loved is to have nothing in common with anything before the shared love of God identifying your very being. The wild thing to me is that this truth and ultimately this reality, my being loved and you too, is real whether I live in this reality or not. The walk was different the other day because it hit me again, like it does often… I get to live this life of the beloved.
