Tag: God’s love for us

Is this what Mercy looks like?

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She screamed almost the entire way home from church.

It was a shock to me.  After church ended, my preschooler bounced out of the nursery cheerful and excited.  We had just marched in the town Christmas parade the day before, so she practiced her “parade wave” all the way down the halls of the church, greeting every single person that passed us by.

But when my daughters climbed all over each other to claim seats in the mini-van for the 12-minute ride home from church—as if they were choosing their positions for a round-the-world tour—my three-year-old hopped in the back seat.

She knows better.  No booster seat until her fourth birthday.  For now, she’s restricted to the five-point harness-equipped seats in the middle of the van.  Normally, she’s just joking, hopping into the back and giggling hysterically until I motion her to her normal place.

Not yesterday.  Apparently she decided that enough was enough.  This waiting until her fourth birthday thing was totally overrated.  No ballet classes until she’s four.  No back seat until she’s four.  No three-day-a-week preschool until four.  No Children’s Church until she’s four.

Sheesh.  It’s a hard life being just three years old.047

The thing is, I love her and it’s my job not just to give her what she wants, but to give her what she needs.  Protection, limits, boundaries, rules, bedtimes, baths, healthy meals, love and affection.  That’s my job.  Making sure she’s in the car seat is part of the parental package.

So I made her move seats.  And she screamed herself to sleep on the drive home from church.

Perhaps to her my restrictions were unreasonable, even mean,

Really, though, it was love and it was grace.  It was looking out for her best no matter what.

We don’t always know what grace and mercy really look like either, do we?

We think that promotion, that dream-guy, that check in the mail, that recovery, that hugely successful ministry event, that healthy child—yes, that’s picture perfect grace.  Those actions that don’t fit our Grace Template are the mysteries of God, the painfully chafing rub of disappointed religious expectations.

In The Book of Common Prayer these last two mornings, I prayed:

“Show us your mercy, O Lord”

“And, we pray, give us such an awareness of your mercies,
That with truly thankful hearts we may show forth your praise,
not only with our lips, but in our lives”

“Have mercy on us, Lord, have mercy.
Lord, show us your love and mercy;
For we put our trust in you.”

Not only have I prayed for mercy, but I’ve prayed for the awareness of it, the ability to see with a truly thankful heart how God is graciously caring for me.

Even when it doesn’t look much like grace at the time.

Even when I’d rather have the easy and obvious mercy, the kind you pop up out of your pew on testimony Sunday to share, the kind that others applaud and rejoice with you about.

I’ve prayed to see with new eyes, looking through a filter of trust in God.  That means trusting in His character, trusting in His love, trusting in His timing, trusting Him no matter what.

The apostle Peter encountered people just like me, those who thought if God wasn’t quick to fulfill His promises, if they had to wait too long or endure too much pain along the way, then God wasn’t fulfilling His end of the “bargain.”

God didn’t move when I thought He would move.  God didn’t provide the way I thought He’d provide.  God didn’t come through for me the way I wanted.

Sometimes we immediately assume the problem is with God.  Maybe He isn’t really good!  Maybe He isn’t really gracious.

That’s what the people in 2 Peter were questioning.  Christ hadn’t returned right away as they expected and life was hard for the persecuted church and waiting was difficult.

Really, though, the problem isn’t with God.  The problem is with our expectations.  The problem is we’ve stopped looking at Him with eyes of trust.

Peter wrote to these struggling believers:

 The Lord isn’t really being slow about his promise, as some people think. No, he is being patient for your sake. He does not want anyone to be destroyed, but wants everyone to repent (2 Peter 3:9 NLT).

God wasn’t being delinquent; He was being patient for their own sake.  It wasn’t deficiency, apathy, or cruelty that caused His delay.

It was mercy, to give people time to accept Jesus Christ as Savior.

Sometimes mercy is “yes” and sometimes mercy is “no.”  Sometimes grace is instant and sometimes it’s waiting and waiting and waiting.

But it is always for our sake.  It is because He loves us that God cares for us the way He does.

Heather King is a wife, mom, Bible Study teacher, writer and worship leader.  Most importantly, she is a Christ follower with a desire to help others apply the Bible to everyday life with all its mess, noise, and busyness.  Her upcoming book, Ask Me Anything, Lord: Opening Our Hearts to God’s Questions, will be released in the Fall of 2013!  To read more devotionals by Heather King, click here.

Copyright © 2012 Heather King

Remembering: Back to School Lessons, Part Two: Love is in the Lunch Box

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Originally posted on September 7, 2011

Sandwich, fruit, snack, drink, napkin.

Check, check, check, check and check,

Two Hershey kisses and a note saying, “Kisses from me to you.  Love, Mom.”

Check!

It really doesn’t matter whether we packed the lunch bag or sent the money in for the lunch line, whether we wrote a note or didn’t, if we enclosed a fancy napkin or sent in a folded paper towel, still we moms likely thought of lunch.  We made a plan to provide for our child’s nourishment.

Not all kids have a mom or dad who lives out love every day through simple acts of kindness and provision.  That makes it easy to forget that a sandwich for lunch and clean clothes for school are an expression of love.

The people in your life, whether they are your children, or your grandchildren, or your aging parents, or a sick friend, could say you love them because of your words.  When I grab my girls in a surprise hug and whisper, “I love you,” my girls always sigh loudly and say in exasperation, “We know, Mom.  You tell us all the time!”

Maybe you tell your loved ones that you care all the time, too.

But there are depths of love that remain inexpressible in words and are only made clear in our actions.  No one may even recognize the love while it’s ongoing, but they would miss it in a heartbeat if you weren’t there.

It’s the fact that we’ve provided for their lunch.  It’s being there to meet the bus at the end of the day.  It’s sitting at the table and patiently working through math problems.

And so much more.

It’s smoothing back hair and bringing juice to a sick child.
It’s reading a book by a nursing home bed.
It’s holding a hand in a hospital room
It’s toting a meal to a recovering neighbor.
It’s washing bed linens soiled by sickness.
It’s writing a note to a friend.

In our everyday lives, our love doesn’t matter much if it’s expressed in words, but never in deed.

God’s love would be a bunch of meaningless words on a page, too, if He didn’t lavish us with grace every day.

There in His Word, He tells us that He loves us.  We most likely read it or say it or hear it everyday and twice on Sundays.

As adults, though, it’s so easy to become blase and apathetic about God’s love for us.  It’s a children’s concept.  The Sunday School theme.  We define God’s love by nursery songs like “Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible tells me so.”

And so over time, it seems we picture God as loving us, but not passionately loving us.  It’s more of an unemotional general concern for our well-being and maybe more for the condition of the planet rather than for us personally.

We’ve even confined one of the most powerful Scriptures in the Bible to a kid’s memory verse and little more:  “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in Him will not perish and have eternal life” (John 3:16).

But did you see that in this verse His love has legs?  He didn’t just say, “Those people I made, they sure are great!  I like them a whole lot and care about them a bunch.”

Oh no.

He put His great love into action.

He loved the world, not just the human population, but you and me and each child on a school bus and each person on your street, individually, uniquely and passionately enough to sacrifice His own Son for our eternal destination.

He wants to spend eternity with you.  Now that’s over-the-top passion.

Why do we sometimes picture God as sitting relaxed on His throne, watching impassively as life bombards us with strife?  Why do we acknowledge that He sacrificed His Son for us and then treat that as “no big deal?”  Or perhaps we fail to recognize the millions of ways He sends gifts of love and grace to us every single day.

In Psalm 136, the worship leader engaged his congregation in responsive praise.  He sang out what God has done for them and the people answer in return, “His love endures forever.”

Twenty-three times they sing back the refrain, declaring that God loves them and always will.

Why?  Just because He said the words, “I love you”?

No, because He “made the heavens” and “set the earth upon the waters.”  He brought Israel out from slavery in Egypt and “divided the Red Sea asunder and brought Israel through the midst of it, but swept Pharaoh and his army into the Red Sea.”  He struck down enemy kings and gave the Hebrew nation the Promised Land.

It’s a litany of God’s love.  “His love endures forever” and we know it because of all He has done for us.

There at the bottom of the long list of reasons to give thanks: “He gives food to every creature” (Psalm 136:25).

Oh, yes, He packs our lunch.

How has God shown you His love today?  How can you give Him thanks?

Heather King is a wife, mom, Bible Study teacher, writer for www.myfrienddebbie.com and worship leader.  Most importantly, she is a Christ follower with a desire to help others apply the Bible to everyday life with all its mess, noise, and busyness.  To read more devotionals by Heather King, click here.

Copyright © 2012 Heather King