The Delicate Touches of Love

I’ve often struggled to understand how we can experience God’s love apart from the knowledge that He suffered and died on a Cross for us 2000 years ago. Isn’t that enough, ask my religious readers. Well, yes, but as a young woman alive in 2018, every now and again I want to FEEL God’s love HERE and NOW.

 But if we know our theology well, we know that just because God loves us doesn’t mean that He gives us everything we ask for, nor does He take away every suffering in our life. On the contrary, He asks us to take up our cross daily and follow Him. His blessings come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and not all are easily recognizable as blessings. And yet they all are. He can and will bring good out of every uncomfortable and unexpected twist and turn of our lives if we offer everything to Him, including getting stuck in traffic, a baby up crying all night, a disappointment in our love lives or careers or families, ants in our kitchen, and everything in between. Even good feelings are not guaranteed in our walk with the Lord.

But we walk with the hope that one day every tear will be wiped away, that our desires for love will be fully met, that everything that is wrong will be made right. ‘I consider our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed to us.’ Romans 8:18

But the Christian walk isn’t just pain and suffering and carrying our cross. God IS a Lover, if an unconventional One, and He desires to lavish His love on us. He allows us to suffer, and asks us to meet Him in that suffering, but He also wants to meet us in the little joys of life. I read a cool story which I can’t look up right now – I think it was about Saint John of the Cross exhausted and starving in the desert, and how he found a bunch of asparagus that he loved to eat tied up under a bush in the desert. In Story of a Soul, St. Thérèse of Lisieux's autobiography, she writes about how she begged the Lord for snow on the day she received her habit , and against all odds, it snowed!

This walk on earth is a pilgrimage, and a journey. It is not home, we are not in heaven yet (and woe to us if we forget that). But along this path, God leaves little tender signs of His love… if only we will ask for them or notice them.

Last weekend I was feeling a little low. There were a few different circumstances of my life that ganged up on me, and left me feeling alone and abandoned. It was just a weekend, not my whole life, but it was a tough weekend. In the midst of that, I called out to the Lord and just asked Him to comfort and console me. I kept busy, did the tasks God had given me to do, but my heart continued to hurt, and I just longed to be loved. I remember thinking of Panchgani, a beautiful place in the hills that my family usually visits in the summer, and wishing I could be there – a place where I always felt loved and close to the Lord.

A few days later my dad texted, “Anyone wants to go to Panchgani?” We thought he was joking because he and my mum had just been there the previous week, and it was unlikely he was going to return so soon. But he was serious – he had some urgent tasks to do there, and he arranged his dates so that my sister and I could go with him, and be back in time for school on Tuesday.

And so here I sit on the edge of a cliff, feeling filled and loved and content and at peace, knowing that I have to be back tomorrow and continue to fight the good fight, but content to be loved by the Lord for this brief moment, knowing that this is a glimpse of heaven, that this is a sign of His intimate, personal love for ME with my Panchgani-hungry heart.

I went on a retreat three years ago where the retreat speakers told us, “Every day ask the Lord – ‘Show me your love today’. And then look out for those signs of His love.” I often forget to ask or to look because I focus of the struggles. But I think that He would like me to meet Him in His sweet gestures of love too. Because suffering and struggles and discomfort can be borne so much more easily when you know that there is One who loves you at your side.

Related Reading 

Jesus Knows My Love Language