God’s love is key to the spiritual life. As we’ve discussed in the past couple of shows, He loves us infinitely and intimately and sent Jesus to reveal His love for us, to make it manifest to us in a real way we could see through the incarnation we celebrate at Christmas. Yet, despite this fact, many times we can struggle to cling to this notion and sometimes the experience of it is distant.
In simple terms, we can divide the blocks to God’s love into two categories, internal and external blocks. Predominately, the external blocks tend to be associated with a lack of human maturity and the internal are related to a lack of spiritual maturity.
Examples of external blocks can be things like preoccupation with worldly concerns, and lack of focus on the true purpose of this life. We can be so consumed with coming and going to and from work and tasks of the day that we forget the goal of this life is really about our relationship with the Lord. It can be easy to forget Him if we don’t make a concerted effort to keep Him central. He is invisible and doesn’t often speak audibly, so it requires tuning our senses to a spiritual setting, like switching a radio from one of human transmission to spiritual transmission. As we learn to see Him in the tasks, relationships, and gifts of the day, to hear Him in the leading of His “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:11-13) we grow in human maturity and become more available to the experience of Him being Personally present to us in the day-to-day.
Internal blocks can come from woundedness that causes us to doubt His goodness or the fact that He loves us deeply and cares for us intimately. He wants to touch every area of our lives and our being and draw us into union with Himself. Hurtful messages we received from painful relationships or situations can leave us doubting this or walled off in a misguided attempt at self-protection. We may also have a lack of appreciation for God’s love. We might assume the time where God was involved with people ended after the Acts of the Apostles or is only in the rare exception like in the lives of canonized saints. The truth is that the Lord’s love is always present to us and He longs to bring us ever more deeply to a place of living in the full joy, and peace of that reality.
May the Lord give you peace!
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