The Lord delights in you. Its hard to imagine a thought more foreign than this. Take all the religions of the world, including the way many approach Christianity, and you have a history of people trying to please a distant, holy, monolith of a deity with little assurance of success. As humans, we grovel, we confess, we beat our bodies, we deprive ourselves, we go through steps and stages of development trying to reach some level of respectability that would allow us to be worthy of the Presence, and then we wait for lightning to strike should we get anywhere near. Would we ever think in terms of bringing this God anything he didn't already possess? Bring God pleasure? How could anyone ever expect to do that?
And yet we do it without doing anything at all.
Any parent knows the feeling of watching their children sleep. There's nothing that can fully describe this. There's something about them in those moments of innocence and vulnerability that pulls at your heart and swallows you up. It takes your breath away. It makes you want to cover them and protect them from all the future hurts the world will surely inflict on them.
We don't know what to do with all the pictures we have of our children sleeping. We cant stop taking them. And isn't it interesting that our children are doing nothing while all this is happening? They aren't smiling. They aren't posing. They aren't performing. They aren't doing anything but sleeping, and they are breaking our hearts in two.
What is this except our taking sheer pleasure in their being? We delight in them because of who they are, and while they sleep nothing gets in the way of our admiration. They bring us sheer pleasure without doing anything at all.
I imagine this is how it is with God. Since he has made us like him, whatever we experience as parents has got to mirror something of what God feels toward us. And I imagine he feels the same thing. So shut your eyes and rest in the knowledge of his love. Know that you bring your heavenly Father pleasure simply by being who you are. You are His and He is yours, and there is nothing you can do today or any day, to change that. The love He has for you is a constant.
He loves you because He loves you.
If an earthly parent knows what this is, you can bet our heavenly Dad does too.
Life's Little Nuggets
Fear grows from what we don't know, faith comes from what we do. [unknown]
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