31 March 2007

love grieves and waits...


Love grieves and waits. It waits above all for God's intervention. God, who has moved in love through his Son and by the Spirit, we know on that basis will continue to act on the grounds of what he has done and accomplished in Christ. So we wait, knowing he is faithful to change us first and to change another as he sees fit. We wait for restoration and reconciliation.

It doesn't matter whether or not we like someone. Someday we will. Why? Because God made all things good and in Christ he is remaking all things and all who are in Christ. We need to reach out at least in hope and prayer as to what God can do in ourselves and in that other who may or may not be alienated from God. Is he able to make all things new, including the longning for relationship with that other that is in our hearts? Yes, of course.

And I can grieve when I don't seem to care anymore about a broken relationship, that God would renew my hope and faltering steps to both pray and to reach out in love. After all we know in the end that it is God who can take us both in into the joy of the perichoretic dance of love that is at the heart of who he is, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This will ordinarily happen in humble human ways, but isn't that what God is all about? He became human so that we might become one together with him. And it is to begin now, grounded in our relationship to God in Christ.

Let's therefore not give up. Let's reach out in love, and especially in hope and prayer to God. Someday we'll fully be realizing the love and potential that relationship brings, together in our God. But through Christ that can begin now.

~Ted Gossard~

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