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8/11/2018 0 Comments limit-lessas i’ve thought about it, i guess part of what drives me to write words is an urge to try to reclaim some images of each other & of God & of the world that fuel hope & love & joy & all those words that are often hard to come by, hard to muster. i write to share & i write to discover & i write to learn more about this pursuit of the best in life & trust that something will come of it. i write because i need a permanent reminder that God really does reveal His character & His image in everything, like in the lady at the spice store who never stopped smiling at me & the guy carrying a dozen roses downtown & the girl on a bike i drove past who was dancing to her music without a care, just loving life.
i write because i heard a message the other day & the woman begged her audience to read God’s word & bask in His love & my instant internal reaction was, “i really, really want to, but what if God’s voice in His word sounds mean to me sometimes” & then i paused & dug underneath my gut & what i found were dozens of images & interactions & sayings & pictures of who i was told God was & some were helpful & some felt hurtful & most felt dangerous & i learned another lesson that day : when we tell each other who God is, it will either be extremely helpful or extremely damaging or somewhere in between, but it will nevertheless almost always impact our pursuit of Him. i’m not saying that the truth about God is never uncomfortable, or that it’s never confrontational, or that the Bible is there to make us feel good about ourselves when we feel down, or give us a pat on the back when our self-esteem is low. this isn’t a post rallying for a watered down version of the gospel — in fact, i wasn’t planning on writing about this at all, but it’s a message that’s heavy on me because so many of us are weighed down & held back by shame & guilt & often what’s underneath that is that at some point in our lives, we were given a damaging image of who God is from someone who may have meant well, but that image didn’t drive us to Him & free us, instead, it shackled us even more. it’s kinda ironic that i’m writing this because here i am about to risk giving you yet another image of God & trusting that it’s who He is & serving as another voice in the world & asking you to keep reading. but i’m a writer & a follower of God & so it’s also kinda why i’m here. here it is : God is limit-less in His love for you. i will never hear this message enough : “who else makes the offer ‘come as you are, broken & battered into my love’? in every other domain of your life it’s ‘earn, achieve, accomplish, go.’ only Christ says, ‘come to me & i will give you rest.’ we are not a religion that requires us to do, do, do. we are a religion that Christ has done.” (from matt chandler - a gospel reminder) His love is constantly wooing you through the kind cashier & the hummingbird dancing & the quiet mornings & the candle burning & the crowded dinner table & the everything around you. a sweet sign in a small store reminded me yesterday that to believe that you’re loved makes you brave. & one of the best things about knowing His love for you is limit-less, is that you know that you also are limit-less in the ways you can love others & love the world. with your today, you are — we are — limit-less in the amount of love we can give, the amount of times we can be for each other, the` amount of kindness we can demonstrate, the amount of sacrifice we can give without expecting a return, the amount of times we can show up & be about each other instead of ourselves. because being a person who is about being about other people is one who exudes the limit-less love of the God who says “before you were loved by anyone, you were Mine.” i believe that’s the truth & i believe that’s one image of God worth holding onto & one worth giving away.
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