Because God first loved us

At a camp I went to one summer in high school, we memorized a verse of Scripture each day. First on the docket: 1 John 4:19. "We love because God first loved us."

This, the leaders said, was the first verse to memorize because it is the foundation of everything. That made an impression on me; all these years later, I remember it and am still learning how true it is. How often I think it is my job to act first in loving God, and I act like a wandering child, lost and without a home. How different my life and my ability to love myself, God and others becomes when I first receive the love of a God who is love and live from that.

In "Waiting on God," French philosopher Simone Weil writes about receiving God's love: "That we have to strive after goodness with an effort of our will is one of the lies invented by the mediocre part of ourselves in its fear of being destroyed. ... In the great symbols of mythology and folk-lore, in the parables of the Gospel, it is God who seeks man. 'Quaerens me sedisti lassus.' Nowhere in the Gospel is there a question of a search undertaken by man. Man does not take a step unless he receives some pressure or is definitely called."

So let us be found. Let us set aside the hindrances we put between ourself and letting God love us. They are no barrier, after all, to a love so deep and true. God is offering God's love to us every moment of every day; we can pray to recognize it. It is found in the reality before us.

I recently realized that rather than daydreaming something away and wishing it were as I would like it to be, I can state -- aloud or in my mind -- the fact of what is and receive that truth. I don't have to be afraid of it. God is with me in it; it is reality God has given me in order to draw more deeply into God, and I want to receive the gift of it. Even if that gift looks different from the one I would choose for myself.

The other day, one of my friend's nieces who is 7 years old asked a beautiful, wise question that goes along with this business of being human and receiving God's love. It was a question I sometimes struggle with, too, if not so bluntly. She, though, put it simply, straightforwardly: she wanted to know why God is God and why she is not.

I don't know the answer. What I do know, though, is that being human is enough; God became human to show us that. If this is what God has willed for me, this incomplete knowledge, this wrestle with reality, this ability to change, then it is enough for me. It is enough to be finite and unsure, enough to have yet-unfulfilled desires, enough to be in process, as I am, right now. It is enough, and I will receive it. This reality, this truth. This love.

Because this is how God asks to know me. And this is how God asks me to know him. We love because God first loved us.