A few weeks ago during a Sunday service I noticed a man in front of me with his two year old daughter on his lap. The child was facing backward over his shoulder, looking calmly into blank space and sucking her thumb. With the other hand she was gently caressing her father's face, running her fingertips over his cheeks, nose and eyes. Both father and child were caught in a moment of love. The child secure and safe, knowing without reasoning that she was loved absolutely. The father enraptured, asking nothing more as a parent than this simple act of love from his daughter. If you had offered him a million pounds he would not have traded that moment.
This turned out to be the answer to a question that I didn't get until later in the week. At our home group many of us were expressing our struggle to discern God's purpose for us and we started to pray about this. It came to me that God wants a lot of things from us and for us. We know that we have work to do but before all that, above everything else He simply wants to love us and to be loved in return.
1How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! 1 John 3
Most of us know what unrequited love feels like. Now imagine how it feels to love someone so much you would die, indeed have died, for them - and they hardly give you a second thought.
Filled as we are with inspirational books with amazing stories of people who have done great things for God and quite literally changed the lives of others, it is easy to get caught up in the desire to fight on the mission field. But just like that father and his daughter in church, although God wants us to have wonderful fulfilled lives the most important thing we can do first is to love him and feel his love for us. Then and only then can we grow up and carry out his plans.
There is a passage which we have heard many times at weddings but I doubt that Paul meant it to be used to illustrate love between a man and a woman when he wrote it. There is another way to read it:
1If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.
1 Corinthians 13
1 Corinthians 13