Beloved Child
“What do you think God feels when he thinks about you?”
This is a question that I didn’t think that I pondered very often, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this question actually passed through my head several times each day. I think this is a question most people wonder about without realizing it on a very regular basis.
Here’s why: your answer to this question deeply shapes and forms your relationship with God.
The answers to this question can and will vary from person to person and will even vary for each individual during different seasons of life.
This answer will also affect your projection of yourself. For example, in my earlier years, I used to see God as an all-powerful robot. Think of a machine that only sees black and white, no gray. Everything I said and did was either right or wrong. There was no in-between. In his work Your God Is Too Small, J.B. Phillips refers to this version of God as the “resident policeman.” This depiction of God makes us want to walk the line, say and do all the right things, and avoid the wrong things. At worst, this version of God spoils our pleasure and at best keeps us negatively on the path of virtue. In essence, we think God is proud of us when we are good and ashamed of us when we do wrong. We convince ourselves that the only way God can love us is if we earn that love. This is also a natural thought process too. If we have to EARN the grades, the playing time, the money, or the approval, then shouldn’t we have to EARN the love of God?
Other people commonly think of God as a “distant father.” I most often hear about this kind of God from people who felt very let down by their earthly father. Since so many church circles refer to God as “father,” those who have had a negative experience with their own father will often equate that experience with their understanding of who God is.
There are plenty of other versions of God that we have fabricated over the course of time and culture. They all have flaws, and they leave God lacking in ways that He has never lacked. Our brains are too small to ever fully realize God anyway, but what does God feel about you?
I can’t help but wonder if this is why so many people want to walk away from God and the church. They have been convinced—often by their own thinking—that God does not love or want them because of their failures in life. If sin is failure, then God’s love cannot be earned—it is already lost.
When I hear from my leadership team how difficult it can be to “love your neighbor as yourself,” I wonder if that might not be because people are difficult to love as much as it is because it’s hard to love your neighbor as yourself when you don’t love yourself all that much.
What if we were to begin all of our thoughts about God as Him seeing us as simply “Beloved Child?”
What if our realization about God’s view of us is that God is hopelessly, irrevocably, ridiculously in love with us? What if God became giddy at the thought of us? What if part of the reason there are so many angels in heaven is because a part of their job is to listen to Him talk about just how crazy He is about us. When you’re truly in love, you can’t shut up about how amazing you think the other person is, and you annoy everyone else around you because you talk about that person nonstop.
I can’t help but wonder how we would each be shaped and formed by the idea of our prayers all beginning with us sitting in the long and loving gaze of the triune God. The idea that God delights in our being and the piece of Himself that He has placed in all of us.
Perhaps our focus would shift from working so hard to love God and others to simply resting in God’s love for us. Perhaps our love for others would flow from the love God continually pours out on each of us and the natural love for others because they contain the same amount of God’s love as each of us do.
Then love would not require merit; love would simply be. To love would be to exist. Perhaps this is how God approached creation at the beginning with a twinkle of us in His eye.
As you go through your week, may you rest in the long and loving gaze of God. May you sit in the assurance that nothing you do will make God love you more or less. This is never-ending, unfailing love, and it is yours in abundance.
