I was planning to go to bed at a decent hour this evening. I was ready for bed, doing my nightly devotion stuff when I stumbled on the following passage in a sermon by Barbara Brown Taylor in her book Home By Another Way:
"This is not a story about us. This is a story about God, and about God's ability not only to call us but also to create us as people who are able to follow--able to follow because we cannot take our eyes off the one who calls us, because he interests us more than anything else in our lives, because he seems to know what we hunger for and because he seems to be food."
This caught my attention, I think, because earlier this evening I was thinking about my own relationship with God. As I was driving home this evening, enjoying the cool evening air rushing through the open car windows, I decided to put in my old Jars of Clay CD. One of the songs on the album has the refrain, "I want to fall in love with you." I have never been one to "fall in love". I'm very practical and pretty skeptical, and anything as out-of-control emotional as falling in love is a stretch for me. But, as someone who loves God in my own way, I understand the desire to fall in love with God. If I'm going to fall in love with anyone, if I'm going to allow myself to be that out-of-control emotional, it would make sense to fall for the One who is worthy of that love and who can be trusted with my heart. And yet, falling in love has still never been something that I do.
But this Barbara Brown Taylor passage sounded to me like falling in love. Not being able to take our eyes off someone? Being more interested in that someone than in anything else in our lives? BBT is describing Jesus calling the disciples on the seashore, but she could just as easily be describing love at first sight. And there are people who talk about their conversion experience or their first experience of God as being like love at first sight.
I have never been one of those people, perhaps because I feel like I've known God forever. If I had to put my relationship with God into human relationship terms, it would be more like a childhood sweetheart with whom I continue to have a growing relationship. I can't remember a time that I wasn't aware of God in some way. Some of my first memories are of praying before bedtime and meals, of going to Sunday School and church, and of leading worship services for my stuffed animals. God has always been both too familiar and too distant to fall in love with in the way so many people describe. Sure, there have been transformative moments in our relationship, moments when I felt God's presence in new ways or when I made greater commitments to my faith. But I cannot pinpoint a moment of falling in love with God.
Perhaps that's why I love this quote so much. God creates each of us and makes us capable of following--in our own ways. God created me and knows that I'm practical and skeptical. God knows that I live in my head rather than in my heart most of the time. And God made me capable of following in my own way: answering the call to follow with my mind and my feet as much as with my heart. God allowed me to fall head-first and feet-first, not head-over-heels.
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"Saint Martha was holy, but we are not told that she was a contemplative. What more do you want than to be able to grow to be like that blessed woman, who was worthy to receive Christ our Lord so often in her house, and to preare meals for Him, and to serve Him and perhaps to eat at table with Him? If she had been absorbed in devotion [all the time], as the Magdalen was, there would have been no one to prepare a meal for this Divine Guest."
--St. Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection
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