Mostly what God does is love you...

"Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn’t love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that."(Ephesians 5:1-2 MSG)

"Watch what God does." I sat with that phrase for a while and out of the waiting came that famous line from the Gospel of John: God so loves the world.

God loves the world, every blade of grass, every hidden aquifer, every grunt and squeal of creatures, every swirl of snow, every life on Flight 752, every heron sweeping low over the waters, every kid who goes to sleep worried about something, every hunk of bread and glass of wine, every polluted lake, every burning bush, every lullaby that we sing.

All of it, all of us, held in that extravagant sacrificial love. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with Them and learn a life of love.

I wonder if learning to love the world again is part of the call of discipleship we have forgotten. If we need to practice it, like children who learn from their parents, practice loving the world, remember how to love it again and again.

The call to learn to love the world again is a call to engage with all of those Big Things, of course - love never makes us smaller and narrower and lonelier, it never shuts us off and away from longing and hunger. But I wonder what it would be like to love the world again so much that we are unable to ignore climate change because the world is crying out for us to love her again. What would it be like to love the world so much that we see the image of God in one another across aisles and streets and political divides and borders and the one we have been taught to fear and resent?

What would it be like to love the world not in general but in particular?

What would it look like to remember how to love the world again even knowing it will break your heart? After all loving anything, loving anyone, is to consent to having your heart broken eventually. Loving is a risk, a shot in the dark, a radical act of faith and hope.

……

I invite you to it with me this year: remember how to love the world. Not in general but in particular. Pay attention, call to mind, be mindful of loving this particular world and your particular people and your particular place and your particular self. Call it to your mind: love is not cautious but extravagant.

-Sarah Bessey