made to be loved

“We're all messed up. It's one of these cynical aphorisms that most people  take for granted. All of us humans, we're messed up. We feel it, perhaps in the instinct to hide pieces of ourselves from others or in the inevitability that we will say or do the wrong thing, hurting someone we care about.”  — Pastor Alex McCauslin

And, yet.

“The God of the universe -- the creator of nitrogen and pine needles, galaxies and E-minor -- loves us with a radical, unconditional, self-sacrificing love. —Francis Chan (“Love Wins”)

“My early childhood experience of the reading from Genesis 1:1-2 was not a happy one. I remember sitting in a circle in Sunday School while we each took a turn stumbling through the words, verse by verse until the end of class.

I don’t recall finishing the chapter, but I do recall being bored t death by the slowness of early readers and the interminable repetition as God created everything night by night and day by day “and God saw that it was good.”

The next time I encountered the text was summer I graduated college … I was given a grammar assignment to learn the Hebrew of the Creation Story as best I could.

I was astonished and shaken to the core as I read in Hebrew this simple, marvelous description of the world emerging, bright and quivering, as God calls it out of chaos into sun, moon, and stars; out of nothing but darkness, wind, and water into dry land and oceans, fish, birds, every kind of plant, fruit tree, insects, animals and every sort of living thing — including human beings. All came bright and alive on the page before me.

I experienced the primordial wonder of the deep goodness of all God’s creation. It was the first I had ever known the world in this way, and my heart filled with joy for everything that was and is and will be.

It was a glimpse of God’s love. The miracle of this fact has never left me nearly sixty years later.” —Roberta Bondi (“The Authority of Love”).

"God, all things are made beautiful in your love."  —Psalms 103:1

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