I God You my Valentine

When a child I was told that God is love. That information made me feel all warm and fuzzy. I imagined that it meant He was like my Teddy Bear who always smiled and let me hug him all night without squirming away.

When Jesus said to love my enemies, to be good to them because God is kind to the ungrateful and wicked I had to think just a little bit harder about what love is. I wondered if God is kind to me when I am ungrateful and wicked; if He patiently waits for me to be kind too. God’s love is not as void as my Teddy Bear’s.

Love has to overcome some pretty powerful resistance to be itself. Being impatient and angry is like sledding down a snowy hill, when really love is walking back up. I suppose I would much rather be loved then to love others.

If I can be loved by God and anyone else who is foolish enough to try hard to become like God who loves His enemies, the wicked and ungrateful, then I don’t have to do anything at all.  I can even be unkind and wicked. I can lie and cheat and steal and hate my sister and God will still love me because He can’t help Himself. He is love and the only way He relates to anyone is via the love channel.

God’s love for each person is a compulsive love which sometimes is appreciated and reciprocated and sometimes it is ignored. Poor God.

I think God tries very hard to be loved and I feel sorry for Him because He doesn’t have anyone above Him, like His own God who must love Him no matter what He does. The way I see it, God works hard for our love.  He teaches, and gives amazing gifts and He heals. These are some of the reasons I love Him so much. I know I can trust Him because He is honest, He never ever lies to me.

I am so happy to know that I don’t have to work as hard to be loveable as God does. I suppose one of the reasons that God wants people to follow Him, to be exactly like Him is for the relief He experiences of being loved no matter what happens in their lives, even bad things that aren’t fixed right away like sickness and poverty or even loneliness.

Okay, I won’t be silly anymore because those thoughts make me feel too sad; it is all so unfair.

God is love. I want to be like Him, just like Him in every way, even when it means climbing up a snowy hill, and loving people who are mean to me or ignore me just as He does. This way God will know He found someone in me that loves Him too, no matter what.

My dear Valentine, you don’t have to be a Teddy Bear for me to love you because of what God taught me. But it would help. :-)    

Goodbye

Goodbye world, I have to go to Lent now. Well, I admit I don’t have to go but I want to, I really want to go. It’s not that I don’t love you; perhaps I love you too much, the way you sit right smack in front of my face day and night so I can barely see God or sometimes even our Mother [the Church]. I have gotten used to that. I don’t like it, but I must say you have grown on me, like a tree that grows wrapped around a rock.

I won’t miss your brashness though. I must say good bye and I want you to respect that. I may have to fight you to get you out of my line of sight, so that’s why I want to have this talk right here and now; why I want to say good bye and I want you to leave me be.

My Mother needs me so I can’t play with you. It is our family holiday. All of Her children come together and we focus, we really focus on our Father and our own family. We will visit with our invisible brothers and sisters; we will sit at the feet of the sages and listen to their words of wisdom. It’s so wonderful! Maybe if we are lucky, really lucky God’s light will shine on us and in us. Some of my brothers and sisters light up like flood lights, it’s so cool to see! Our Father makes us feel so warm and loved. He plants us in His garden and waters us and shines on us and watches us grow up high towards Him. We become like a field of tulips, but we are still people, His very own people, His children and no one else’s.

No! You can’t come with me. That would wreck the whole thing! Don’t you see? It’s you that we need to separate from. You have no idea whatsoever of what I am really talking about. You are blind and ignorant and mean and busy and arrogant and stupid and selfish and shortsighted and I am really and truly sick of you. I can’t tell you in strong enough words how happy I am that my family goes on this vacation together every year…away from you!

I suppose being angry is not a good way to start this trip. I am sorry. I know you can’t help being what you are.

Okay, I’ll try again. Goodbye world. I must leave, but whether I like it or not, I will return and you can have me back. Before I go I want to thank you for all that you have done for me. Thank you for money because it has taught me so much and helped me to mature when I had none of it and when I had enough for anything I wanted to buy from you. It has helped me to be generous and if it wasn’t for you I couldn’t have used money to love people with.  I also want to thank you for the entertainment, books, movies, music, natural catastrophes, politics -- all those things you do so well to mesmerize us. You have very successfully enticed me, as I said before, probably too much. Oh, the food and drink, anything I want whenever I want it! Good job. The flavors and textures and the intoxication—all terrific. I can’t hate you for that—just for sucking me in so much with them. Not your fault, my fault.

That’s why I need to leave and I am so glad for the family reunion.

Listen body, I know you probably don’t want to go because you and world are so tight, but just cooperate for fifty short days and I’ll send you back. I need you to help me to get to the reunion. You are so much like money you should be considered twins of the world the way you help and hurt with equal enthusiasm, and how equally you can help me reach either the heights or the depths of life on this planet.  But it’s only with your cooperation that we can find our way to the reunion. You can be a real hero! Please don’t put up a fight, say good bye and let’s go.

Oh, two last things I want to say to the world before I leave. First, I want to tell you how cool it is that you are celebrating Valentine’s Day today, this day before I start my trip away from you. It shows me that you can see a glimpse of where my family and I are going and what we will do there. How sweet. I wish you could celebrate Love more often. But I gotta tell you, it’s much more than chocolate, roses, and body stuff. And lastly, I need to say, you will see me during Lent but please DON’T EVEN SAY HELLO.

Good bye!