Posted on by sofiaseekerofgod

Love others but you might not Please Them

If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.

Paul, Galatians 1:10

Love your neighbor as yourself.

Part of the verse Mark 12;31. Both NIV

These verses seem to make a strange pair. Can a person love someone else as much as themselves, but not feel compelled to please them? It can be difficult to love people who disapprove of us, judge us, or don’t love us back. But if we can love someone who is unlovely or unloving, we participate in a mystery with Christ who loves without love being returned. He loved so deeply he took on the sins of us all, to invite a relationship between God and human that would not have happened otherwise.

Jesus was the Son of God so he apparently could tolerate being despised and rejected by men, but how do we mortals handle rejection? We can do this by getting our need for approval from others out of the way. When we are young, we become civilized by learning from others what is the approved behavior. As we grow emotionally, and have permission to think for ourselves,we do not automatically defer to others to tell us what is correct. Freedom of thought begins with the magical question, “why?”. If we are lucky, we are allowed to ask this question, as it teaches us to reflect.

And if we learn to reflect, along our path of growth we learn that people are not always correct in their assessments. They are not objective. The approved behavior may merely be convenient for them, or decreases their sense of guilt or anxiety. What if what they want is at odds with our spiritual life? What if they are disappointed and love us a little, or a lot less? How can we tell if we are giving others a place God should occupy? We know there is a problem if we are crushed by the disapproval of others, rather than merely disappointed.

I have noticed that we all want to be liked, and we all in our natural, un-defensive state, we value others and seek a positive response from them. If we don’t there is something deeply damaged in us, to the point we have dehumanized ourselves and others. I think that has something to do with the fact that we are all made in the image of God, and at some level we recognize it in others. You can see this when you begin to talk and behave differently when someone comes into the room. Whether it is a friend or a stranger, a certain amount of energy is expended, even just becoming aware of a presence.

Some people expect a lot more than that. Some only feel loved or valued if others agree with them. Since spiritual and psychological identical twins don’t exist, those who need exact mirroring are eventually disappointed. It is only a matter of time, and those who need total agreement will be disappointed and leave so faking agreement only delays the inevitable. The need for mirroring when we are adults is a wound, and it doesn’t heal the wound to trying to copy the wounded person.

Maybe we are one of these wounded, and only feel temporarily loved when someone totally “gets” us, which means understands and often means agrees with us. Not only do we often let other play God by judging us, we may demand they play God by understanding us completely. (Note: Marital advice–don’t look for complete understanding in a marriage. This expectation is too much for a marriage to bear. Marriage is a mystery that unfolds over many years.) This is God’s job, to completely “get” us.

One of God’s great love notes to us in Psalm 139 says that even before a thought is in our head God knows it. God know why we had it, and how many times were had it before. God understands us way better than we understand ourselves.

The most amazing thing we can do is to love when we haven’t been loved, or are not loved. This is Divine. To love but also be true to our spiritual journey when it disappoints others also takes us to a deep and honest place where we can grow in amazing ways. And finally, when we long for something from another person, is that something that can really only be supplied by God? Check with God and see.

Posted on by sofiaseekerofgod

Abundant Life in God?

You fill me with joy in your presence. David, Psalm 16:11

To miss joy is to miss all. Robert Louis Stevenson, 1887

I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

Jesus, John 10:10

What is a life to the full, or an abundant life, as some Bible translations say? Is it an intellectual idea or a way of existing? Is it for believers now or only after this life? I have an idea it can be all of that. There is something innate that makes us long for abundant life in God, now and to come. We do not just want to know about God. We are wired to seek a relationship with God.

Humans are wired for relationship from birth. Babies come out ready to attach—longing to be enfolded in the love and warmth of a parent. We never lose that longing, first for our parents, then others, and ultimately God.

We long to lose ourselves in the divinity of another. Unfortunately, most of the time we project God’s divinity onto another, which can be euphoric for awhile and often ends in heartbreak. But if we can imagine the most extreme joy and attraction we have had for another human, then put that longing to God—that’s only the beginning.

Many of us cannot imagine a God that is amazing. We often see God as a distant, clueless, grumpy, shifty, disengaged, old man. When life is tough we can see God as out of touch, harsh and elusive.

What if we watch for God to show up in the not so traditional and expected ways? God could be in a burning bush as Moses experienced, or a still, small voice like Elijah heard. God could inhabit a sunset, a ladybug, a baby or an old man. How about God being in a thought, a feeling, or an idea? If we can see God in all things and through all things as Colossians 1:17 suggests, we can experience abundant life in God daily.

Posted on by sofiaseekerofgod

The God We Cannot See

Some people will talk about their relationship with God as if God were a scolding, remote, impossible to please parent. God requires something that they can’t quite figure out but if they don’t they will not receive God’s goodness. These same folks will speak lovingly and enthusiastically about a lover, baseball, football, a rock star, movie star or some other unattainable person that evokes magical feelings in them. I hear tender attentiveness to the cherished object. I hear people experiencing something larger than themselves (even if they are agnostic). How often to people talk with this level of love and passion about God? How many people feel this adoration for God? I don’t know the answer to these questions but I am guessing it’s not enough.

People are made to worship and tend to be good worshippers of something. It begins when we are infants and totally dependent on our parents for life. They are all powerful and we are powerless. We are wired from birth to depend on someone far more powerful than we are. We we begin our journey in this world idealizing another. Even the agnostic Sigmund Freud realized this when in 1914 he wrote in A Schoolboy Psychology that our first template for God is our parents. When we are infants and toddlers we think of our parents as God, then soon after parents are not quite God but God-like. By about age five they are God’s assistants, maybe having a special hotline to God. When we are old enough to see our parents’ flaws we look for something to be the recipient of our need to to worship.

I know I projected God onto a human in those early years. Around age five, as a pee wee theologian, I believed that God worked as a clerk at our local supermarket. (That was before the movie “Oh God” came out but apparently someone else had the same idea about God’s involvement in the grocery business.) This man seemed so kind and gentle but I got suspicious when he said, “Hi Joe. How are you?” to my Dad, who somehow was in tight with God. This was a strange question for a God who already knew how we all were, my dad included. Also, I wondered why was God wearing glasses since he’s perfect. I concluded that it was a clever disguise to avoid exposing His undercover operation because even at age five I knew that God made us search hard for Him.

While all of us begin life thinking of God as a concrete person we can see, we are meant to use this only as a beginning place to know God as real. We are meant to emotionally and spiritually outgrow this need we have to make God something we can see, hear and hug. But unless we deliberately work at spiritual maturity, we do not grow. God seems disengaged and uncaring. Then we tend to project the passion meant for God onto a person, thing or experience on earth and miss the mysterious joy of relationship with an invisible God whose fingerprints are everywhere.