Allowing God to use our experiences

Several months ago, I read a post on the musician Kimbra's blog in which she wrote about the tattoo she'd recently gotten to memorialize time she'd spent in Ethiopia.

To her, the tattoo stood as a visual reminder that these deeply impactful experiences couldn't be taken away from her -- like the ink in her skin, they had become a part of her, no matter where she was on the globe.

I think the same is true of people and experiences we've loved and feel like we've lost, either through death, distance or time.

The people and experiences we've known God's love through can never be taken away from us -- they become part of us, like the Body of Christ. Love, when it's true, can't die. It remains.

In "Confessions," St. Augustine, speaking to God, writes, "Grief eats away its heart for the loss of things which it took pleasure in desiring, because it wants to be like you, from whom nothing can be taken away."

When we grieve, we desire fullness, and it hurts because it feels like a piece of this is missing as a result of the separation we've experienced. We yearn to have someone or something we once had whom we love. This person or experience we love was never really ours, though, but a gift to us, because love never strives to possess anything or anyone.

The hurt we feel in grief is our experience of our humanity that knows it is meant for God, created in the image of the one "from whom nothing can be taken away."

It allows us to remember that all we are finds fulfillment only in God and his love. He is bringing all things to himself. In all we are, in all we want, it is him we desire.

This summer at a water park I watched a little girl see water shoot up from the ground of the water playground for the first time.

At first she was surprised, then curious, and stayed to watch it shoot up again.

She stuck her hand out to touch it and then waved her hand back and forth in the stream of water in wonder, awe and delight.

She had a smile on her face and was unaware of it.

As I watched her, I found myself hungry for this kind of delight, this kind of unselfconsciousness, this kind of discovery and captivation in the present. This kind of worship and experience of God, assurance of his love and care for me.

"Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied." Jesus has been here all along, I know, and it is good. I've been given experiences of love to be able to more deeply love whoever I'm around right where I am, now.

Maybe it's not so much about beginning again new, but taking all the things we are, all the places we've been, everyone we've loved and everything we've learned, and continuing, letting it all be a part of us and letting God do with it what he, we and the world, needs.