Category: love/mercy of God

You’re broken, but beloved

Sr. Dorcee, belovedLeave a comment

From Ann Voskamp’s, The Broken Way:

“He looks like Jesus kneeling down in front of a woman caught in adultery, and it comes like a slow grace, how Jesus handled her critics: He deeply unsettled the comfortable and deeply comforted the unsettled.  The woman grabbed by the Pharisees was given what I myself desperately need.  Before all the pointing fingers, Jesus looked up at the wounded and rewrote her fate: ‘You’re guilty, but not condemned.  You’re busted up, but believed in. You’re broken, but beloved.’

“Whatever you’re caught in, I make you free.  Whatever you’re accused of, I hand you pardon.  Whatever you’re judged of, I give you release.  Whatever binds you, I have broken.  All sin and shame and guilt and lack I have made into beauty and abundance.

“Who get over a love like this?  In the midst of trials, Jesus guarantees the best trial outcome: you’re guilty, but you get no condemnation.  No condemnation for failing everyone, no condemnation for not doing everything, no condemnation for messing up every day.  Who gets over a release like this?

“You are Mine and I am yours, and all I have is yours and all you have is Mine.  I marry you to the mystery of whole perfection, and I carry all your brokenness to divorce you from all despair.”

God comes to us

Sr. Dorcee, belovedLeave a comment

“God comes to us not where we should have been if we had made all the right choices in life; not where we could have been if we had taken every opportunity that God has offered us; not where we wish we were if we didn’t have to be in the place where we find ourselves; not where we think we are because our minds are out of sync with our hearts; not where other people think we are or think we ought to be when they are attending to their own agendas. God meets us where we really are.”

Margaret Silf

Nothing is too small, pathetic or shameful

Sr. Dorcee, belovedLeave a comment

I’m one of those people who constantly gets stuck in the rut of trying to fix myself, to make myself better, and then to approach God.  Be perfect before I seek His help.  Well, you can imagine how well that works out.  God, in His great mercy, keeps working on changing that attitude.  That’s why I love this piece by Sister Ruth Burrows.  The answer is in the second to the last sentence.  Read on.

Let me stress a little more the supreme importance of refusing to evade our own personal poverty, refusing to be discouraged by it.  Only too easily, self-disgust and discouragement become spiritual waste.  I think it is of utmost importance to use everything for loving.  After all, our lives are made up of “nothings”!  We can be on the lookout for the big occasions and let slip the hundreds of little opportunities when divine love is asking to be let in.

Nothing about us is hidden from the loving, compassionate eyes of God, but when we are feeling miserable within, shamed, silly, dirty even, we hide away.  God isn’t in all this, we implicitly assume.  But God is in all this, to us, contemptible stuff.  We love very much by this lack of childlike trust.

Through what is happening to us, we are brought to face our sinfulness, our selfishness, our inadequacy or whatever it is.  Yet this is God’s moment.  It, I believe, in the constant, almost hourly choices that these humiliating, self-revealing experiences afford us, that true holiness and union with God is brought about.  I’m sure that what God longs for us to do is never to stop looking in his compassionate eyes.  Nothing is too small, pathetic or shameful to be used for love.