You know that Love is not a feeling. It's not an emotion that feels nice and warm. A man may crave a chocolate biscuit but, if he's diabetic, giving him the thing that he wants might hurt him badly. We can kill with kindness, after all. Love rejoices in the truth.
Love is not about making someone happy. If someone rejoices in lies, then loving them will hurt them for love rejoices in the truth.
And you know this because God is Love and God is not an emotion. And God does not want to make us happy. If He does, then all the pain, sorrow and suffering would disappear. If God wanted us to be happy then there would be no sadness.
What sort of Love is this? Who would want Love like this?
[PAUSE]
We are always tempted to see things in the small without any regard for the wider context. Our lives are limited to about eighty years and to the places we occupy in those eighty years. We cannot know why God permits Evil - at least not fully - but we can trust Him to love us.
For God wants nothing less than our perfection. We are made to be perfect even as He is perfect. The fact that God wants us to be perfect means that there is a meaning for our lives. God intends you to become the perfect you.
But Love does not insist on its own way. You are free not to become the perfect you if you want to, or even to have your own idea of what the perfect you is. But your idea of the perfect you may not be God's idea. We have taken that choice for ourselves when we took the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, so that we can say what Good and Evil are for ourselves independently from God.
[PAUSE]
God's love for us makes us sad because it confronts us with the truth that we don't want to hear. God's love for us makes us sad because it confronts us with the consequences of our decisions. We live in the tension between our good and God's good; we live in the tension of our love and God's Love; and we live in the tension between what we want for us and what God wants for us.
Humanity is an orchestra which has God's music in front of it. Each of us can play what's written or we can choose to "improve" on it because we think we know better. That's why there is so much noise, so much out of tune and so much distress.
[PAUSE]
Lent is about confronting this tension and embracing the sadness of our lives. We are not perfect - yet! But repentance puts us back into God's plan of perfection. Lent is our chance, not for happiness, but for joy. We withhold from ourselves what we like in order to find what we truly desire. We stop looking at the smallness of our lives but rather embrace the vastness of lives lived with the Holy Ghost dwelling in us at the fullest. We stop looking at ourselves in Adam and we start looking at ourselves in Christ.
God bless your Lent and may it bring you closer to your perfection in Him!
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