Photocopy Relationship

In your loneliest time, have you desired someone’s love, wishing that somehow you could MAKE THEM love you? We women can become obsessed with our appearance, in hope of making someone love us. But surely we know that THAT is not love. Love is a choice made from the innocence of human need and attraction. We are loved and do love for who we are. Anything else is manipulation.

We must CHOOSE God. So back to God’s ability to take on evil, as in unholy thought and behavior: He never leaves us without the responsibility to make choices. Do we love Him or not? There is clear evidence: seeking to see Him, hear Him, know Him, trust Him, talk to Him, obey Him, do for Him…this is love. His promise in return: “Ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and the door shall be opened unto you.” ~Matthew 7:7
In answer to my friend’s proposal, God CANNOT consume HIS OWN REJECTION (SIN), by drawing it in—NO. Denying God His desire for us to FREELY love Him is what puts us out, beyond His reach, past the boundary of His protection. If God COULD drag people in, kicking and screaming, they would be slaves to a tyrant! Those are just the facts of reality. God is not some cosmic projection of our minds…He is very realistic, personal, genuine.

You women, or men, with possessive mates KNOW what I’m talking about. With trust gone out the window, relationships are no longer grounded in love. They are barely relationships at all! God sees the heart and He KNOWS who trusts Him. Jesus DID come to “take away the sins of the world.” Now the ball is in our court. (Make a note: God has not dropped the ball so that this notion of God’s holiness swallowing evil will just “happen”. That triggers a vision of the beatnik era: “What’s hap’nin?” : D Yeah, it’s not like that. Death, swallowed by the Risen Christ, still packs a wallop for the one who rejects God at His Word.) True, honest relationship can be nothing other than give and take. Our existence in relationship with one another is a photocopy of God’s hope for relationship with us. Parents love when their children talk with them, women love for their husband to trust and honor them, children yearn for attention and praise from their parents, men are lonely and need friendships… respect for who they are. Honesty and trust that those around us won’t trample our emotions when we let them show…real needs of real people. Do you see the resemblance? Prayer…praise…thanks…trust…God wants what we want!

In His image, we see God in these truths. In the same way that WE WILL NEVER be able to make someone love us, NEVER get beyond our vulnerability because even a shell of denial can be broken,--in this way, God is bound. God is limited. God is fragile…so easily hurt.

In everything that God IS, God remains omnipotent. He is boundless in love and compassion, waiting for His creation to turn back to Him. He is perfectly just to satisfy the seeker and discern the fraud.