Does He Love Me?

I feel like I have entered something of a quiet season. For me a little quiet is like gold, but too much can feel oppressive. Ok that's dramatic, its just that once again I am looking at the beginning of a long day which doesn't have much to fill it. That makes someone out there green with envy I know, but keep in mind I'm not on vacation, I'm home feeling the yucks.  Days 9-15 following an infusion are the point at which white blood cells are the lowest and I am at day 13 today, right in that window. I have some dental work that can't be fixed while on chemo, so I'm going to the dentist to see if I have an infection making me feel sick.  If its not the tooth, then I may need to limit being around groups of people. Work, exercise class, biweekly walks around the lake with my friend, fellowship events at church, church itself, dates with Ben or others, all have had to go by the wayside in some way or another during this season, which brings a lot more solitude to life.

All this time gives me time to think, a lot. I always end up pondering the things that matter to me most, like where am I going, and how does God feel about what I am doing? I've always asked God to tear down my flimsy construction job and build me up Himself.  What I mean is, I know I think wrong things, but I want to think God's way. First on that list these past few quiet days has been, "Do I really believe that God loves me? " I mean really loves me? Because if I really did there would be no room for doubt or fear, but to be honest, I've had plenty of both even though I am a follower and a believer. Where do I get off track? Sometimes its really easy to believe, and then there are times when I just can't.

Somehow I think the strength I need comes down to being able to answer this question in the affirmative. If I can't do that, then there is room for lots and lots of other things like fear to come in and take the place of my lost confidence...or other destructive dark clouds like disillusionment, frustration, hopelessness, cynicism or a critical spirit, to name a few. You see, if I truly believe that God loves me, that will affect every other single thing that I think or do in every situation. If He loves me, then my present lack is something that I go through with Him rather than retreat from Him licking my wounds of disillusionment. If He really loves me, then the fear of all those possible disasters I worry about lose their power. If He loves me, I can wait however long it takes to see my prayers answered, or not answered at all.

The problem is, the times when troubles come is when its really easy to doubt. We forget that Job went through an intense season of loss and suffering, but though he cursed the day he was born he never cursed his God. Jesus felt forsaken by His Father when he took on the sins of the whole world, "Father, why have You forsaken me?",  but He stayed on the cross and saw it through. Corrie Ten Boom, who wrote about the her suffering and the death of her entire immediate family in concentration camps in WWII, toured Europe after the war admonishing others to forgive each other as she also forgave her captors. They say that in the years before death as she lay in a coma that the power of the Holy Spirit was so strong in her room that it made people weep who went to visit her. I visited my friend a little while ago who was in her last few days on this earth because of cancer, who put her arms around my shoulders and prayed that God would heal me so that I could live.  Start looking around and you too will find that you don't have to go far to find people living in the power of believing that God loves them.

The bible says that faith, hope and love exist, but the greatest of them all is love. Although in context it refers to the value of what we offer to others, I've seen a new wrinkle to its meaning in this meditation. I believe love is the greatest of them all for the additional reason that it makes faith and hope possible.

I'll bet most of you don't know this, but if you have always had hair and then you have none, its like the tinfoil got removed and you have a clearer connection with the other world. Its much more difficult to be pretentious when you head is uncovered, easy to feel vulnerable, but also more free to be emotionally unrestrained. Spiritually, this is a good place to be. Maybe for some of us that is what the whole journey is about, to be more attentive, more honest, to communicate with God from the heart rather than just the mind, and to get to the root of things...like answering the question straight on without shrinking back, "Does He love me?"  If I can accept that the answer is yes, then no matter what is going on in my life at the moment, abundant life is possible right here today.

So that's what I'm thinking about this quiet day!