Perfect Love

I believe that God loves perfectly.

I believe in a fear beyond rote memorization.

I believe in Caedmon’s Call being good for the soul.

I believe God loves me in ways no one else could understand.

I believe I don’t have to write something down for it to be understood or say something for it to be heard.

I believe I am a terrible lover.

I believe that “they will know we are Christians by our love, by our love.”*

I believe “we have great power in hurting each other.”**

I believe we’re meant to anticipate one another.

I believe “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” (or it’s going away).***

I believe a lot of what Donald Miller has to say in Blue Like Jazz— but I’m still a traditionalist for the sheer reverance of a candlelit sanctuary.

I believe in that same splendor on the campus green in the afternoon.

And I believe in taking walks at night in the dark.

I believe that the best dark walks are chilly, and it should probably rain, to boot.

I believe we make getting caught in the rain a bad thing because it’s something we cannot control.

I believe God speaks softest and strongest when things are out of my hands.

I believe I don’t have to be so sophisticated, after all.

This I believe—

God makes the complex simple and embraces the unlovable. He adds to my lack, he forgives my flagrant grievances, and he knows me -intimately enough- to love me -intimately- beyond anything I will ever experience. He loves me for who I am in HIM. My sin is the limit of his love. Because God loved me from the beginning— he made an end to that limit with his son. I believe we all have the choice of letting God love us this way.

——

*Popular Hymn “One in the Spirit”

**From Fitzgerald’s -This Side of Paradise-

***From “Big Yellow Taxi”