“In one sentence, what does it come down to — what is the one most important thing for people to know?”
The Romanian journalist leaned forward, asking me the question at the end of an hour long interview on live radio broadcasting across a country that was under rigid and oppressive Communist regime still in our recent life times.
What I don’t feel was rushed or hurried, only this palpable, certain, steadying peace. What matters can take its own time.
I looked down at the floor, as if I could find the weighty answer laying there somewhere at my feet — how in the world to know the answer such a question? Where was the string of words that was but one sentence, that was ultimately the one thing in all the universe that matters most?
As I scanned the mental shelves of my mind, groped along almost half a century of messy experience, looking for that one sentence to emerge, I not only felt inept — but I felt the growing silence filling the heavy moments of live radio. Yet what I didn’t feel was rushed or hurried, only this palpable, certain, steadying peace. What matters can take its own time.
There are roads ahead of us that are dauntingly steep and seem unnavigable —- and yet we relentlessly try to keep up and not fall behind everyone else seemingly sailing by with a blithe wave and not a piddling care in the world.
There is grief and there is loss and there is diagnosis and gravestones and mounting bills and exhaustion and depression and crisis and what is the most important thing for a soul to ultimately know?
And there it was….
I’m not sure at all how fully I’d known it the moment before, or would have recognized it as the apex of importance.
And I know for sure that the truth of it hasn’t fully migrated down from my cerebellum to heart chamber and vein, but once I started to say the words, the utter gravity of them grounded me, I could feel it, grounded all matter because this is what most matters, this is what is at the crux of the cosmos, this is what is at the center of all our stories, this is the most important reality to know, and I said the words slow and close to the microphone and national airwaves:
“At the heart of the universe, is the face of God smiling love over you. What is most important in the universe isn’t eschatological or philosophical — it’s about a Love that’s unconditional. “
The thing that you most need to know is this:
At the heart of the universe, is the face of God smiling love over you.
The Romanian journalist across the table from me, her eyes glistened and she nodded — yes.. yes… yes... slow and certain.
What is most important in the universe isn’t eschatological or philosophical — it’s about a Love that’s unconditional.
I blinked it back there in the radio studio.
I have fell to the earth and sobbed at accident scenes lined with emergency responders, and I have struggled to stand when the hearse drove away with a body of someone larger than life to me, and I have wiped away grief as our baby cried for us as a white gowned team carried her into open heart surgery and I’ve wept behind closed doors over all kinds of unspoken broken that never seems to heal — and yet, nothing could be more true:
The most important story of the world is this: the unconditional love of God.
The most important headline of the universe is that the heart of God is for you.
The most important reality is that nothing can ever happen to change the reality of God’s love for you.
At the heart of whole universe and the holy Word, you do not find…
“For God was actually so disappointed with you … that He shook His head in gutted despair and begrudgingly went to the Cross for the failure of you. “
Or that “God was so disgusted with you … that He shamed you by passively aggressively dragging Himself to the Cross because of the mess of you …“
Or for “God was so full of wrath toward you… that He thundered to the Cross in volcanic rage that He could hardly contain because of the vileness of you.“
The most important headline of the universe is that the heart of God is for you. The most important reality is that nothing can ever happen to change the reality of God’s love for you.
Rather… at the heart of the whole universe and the holy Word are the words that are the very heartbeat of holy God:
For God so loved the world — you — that He gave Himself … and for you who believe in a purifying, perfect, protective love like His, you get to live forever with Divine Love Himself.
Father God loving you, Jesus Christ saving you, Holy Spirit wooing you — the Triune God never stops working all things into the good of being closer to you because of unassailable delight in you, and the good of getting to be with you.
When we were still deep in our sin, “God clearly shows and proves His own love for us, [as] Christ died for us” (Ro. 5:8).
When He rises in holy, righteous wrath over brokenness and sinfulness — it’s only because His heart so delights in yours, He will not stand for injustice to defile your heart or any heart.
Love, and longing to be with you, drove Him to the Cross, to cover all the brokenness and sin that was getting in the way between your heart and His. At the center of history and the universe is the reality that: The atonement at the Cross, the linchpin of all of history, was so He could at at-one-ment with you.
When He weeps with you and deeply grieves with you — it’s because His heart so delights in yours that His heart breaks with yours.
When He mysteriously and painfully allows what cuts deep — it’s because His heart is so committed to the wholeness of yours, that He leans in as the tender surgeon who allows a severe and sanctifying mercy to do the soul-saving work of shalom.
My therapist had said words that I’d scrawled across the top of a blank page in my journal:
You will persevere in life as well as you practice being receptive to Love.
“Your real work in the world is this: Practice opening up, being receptive, to God’s love. Perseverance is the practice of being receptive to Love.”
I keep returning to this like a compass that keeps turning me toward the most meaningful, whole life — turning me toward the gentle, delighting smile of God in everything.
How do you practice being receptive to God’s love?
To change the neuroplasticity of our brains requires the intentionality of practice…
And to change the progress of our lives, requires the practice of being receptive to love.
What if every part of you that you’ve labelled unlovable is exactly where Jesus writes: unconditionally loved
So I say it to myself, in the midst of lists and appointments and disappointments and loss and all the obstacles that are life: “Let God love you today any way He wants to love you. Let God love you through these moments and circumstances. Through whatever’s happening— feel the ways God is always happening to love you.”
You will persevere in life as well as you practice being receptive to Love.
I am a slow learner to the warmth of His delight, “Warm me, your servant, with a smile, save me because you love me… Blessed God! His love is the wonder of the world.” (Ps 31: 14).
When you deeply trust that God’s smile rests on you — no matter what happens, your soul is deeply at rest.
When you don’t resist all the unexpected ways God is loving you — you can expect to be the one who persists.
She who persists is the one who never resists but accepts that God is going to love in unexpected ways.
Because that is the most important thing to be expected:
When you know God smiles over you, and you’re won over by His smile, you are no longer under the pressure to strive for His smile, but you joyfully thrive because of His smile.
Expect the lovingkind smile of God, “expect God to knock at your door, expect God to rise on your horizon, expect hope and mercy and miracles and a glass of cold water, but just don’t expect God to come looking any way you expect. Expect nothing but hesed, the steadfast lovingkindness of God—- just not in the kinds of ways you dreamed” (excerpt from WayMaker).
What if not expecting to be loved by God through everything is the most heartbreaking sin under everything?
What if not expecting to be loved by God through everything is precisely what turns us toward all kinds of lesser loves that betray us?
What if the unexpected and unparalleled goal of a life well-lived is to feel unconditionally loved by God?
What if every part of you that you’ve labelled unlovable is exactly where Jesus writes: unconditionally loved.
And as with God, who is Love Himself, so it is with people: Unconditional love doesn’t mean unconditional agreement with someone but unconditional sacrifice for someone. God so unconditionally loves you as you are, that He won’t leave you as you are, but grows you into all you are meant to be, because growth is always what it means to be thriving and flourishing.
Unconditional love never leaves us unchanged, because anything stagnant and unchangeable isn’t growing but slowly dying.
The smiling delight of God will always bring us out of dark and into greater and greater light.
After the Romanian journalist closed out the radio program and signed off the air, she found my eyes and she held them, smiling, nodding again: yes, yes, yes.
Yes! Because the God of the universe smiles on us — everything changes in the universe.
When you know God smiles over you, and you’re won over by His smile, you are no longer under the pressure to strive for His smile, but you joyfully thrive because of His smile.
Her and I both brim liquid love, radiant smiles filling the space.
None of us may be living the life we imagined, but we are living the realest love story beyond imagining: In Christ, very Love Himself smiles and “celebrates and sings because of you, and He will refresh your life with His love” (Zephaniah 3:17 CEB).
And all across the realest airwaves in the universe, in our hearts, there’s this reverberating of a relief and joy that cannot be contained.
How do you actually practically find way to to live that is receptive to the love of God — so that you can actually persevere?
What does it personally look like to form your mind, your days, your life, into the deeply meaningful, cruciform love of Jesus and let God love you in the ways He deems good and best?
What does it powerfully look like to have a new way of life, a new way of being that rests fully in the hesod loving kind ways of God?
