God, part 1: Love

Wise crow asked me, quite a while ago, if I had thoughts on justifying my faith with my scientific background. It’s a fair question, and at first I thought that of course I’d be able to discuss this with some degree of coherence.

However, whenever I sit and try to write, it won’t flow. The thoughts just dig in their heels and call out from my brain, “We’re good in here! No need to be written down! Think about something else!”

I shrugged and decided that when it was time for me to write about it, the words would come to me in some way. I had ideas of what I wanted to say – stories I thought were important – but when I decided to start writing this, I concluded that while they indicated why I thought I was right in what I believe, they don’t encompass why I believe it. Can’t encompass it, in any real way.

Faith a personal thing – how I think about God and Our relationship could be vastly different than the person sitting in the pew in front of me or someone on the other side of the world. For me, that’s beautiful. We’re all different and who would understand that better than God? So in His dealings with us, perhaps He picks the best approach.

I therefore have no expectation of this being some great essay on Christianity. All I can offer you is how it works for me. Because I’ve thought about it a great deal, find myself comfortable sharing these stories, and because I’m prefacing it with these paragraphs explaining that I don’t have any illusions that this would be the “right” way to anyone to do this. It’s just my way.

Thinking it over, the exchange that follows could not have occurred after my fourth birthday, so I was really young.

“Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. A-men.”

Always struck me as creepy, even when I was little. Left me lifting my eyelids as I lay on my bed, holding Mom’s hands to say our prayers before sleep.

“I’m not going to die tonight, right, Mom?” I remember asking.

“No. It’s just in case.”

“Because I wouldn’t want to leave. Not without you and Daddy and Grandma and Grandpa.”

“Do you know how much I love you?” Mom asked. “How much we all love you? How we keep you safe and want you to learn and buy you presents and take you places?”

I nodded and smiled, because I liked the love – cuddles and books, Care Bears and trips to the mall.

“Well, I love you as much as I can. I’ve never loved anyone more. I would do anything for you, Katie. Anything at all. If someone told me to jump off a cliff to save your life, I’d do it.”

Then I frowned because nobody needed to jump off cliffs. That got back to this death thing that had aroused my initial concern. I was her first child though, born when she was 30 after 10 years of deliberating over having one at all. So permit her the intensity of her love for me.

“Well, as much as I love you, it’s nowhere close to how much God loves you. So when I say this prayer, I think about how no matter what bad things might happen, He’s watching over you, loving you so so much, and He’ll make sure you’re safe and cared for. Even when Daddy, Grandma, Grandpa and I aren’t around.”

Well, that sounded nice. Someone who loved me more than my favorite people? If He loved me that much, there must be some really good presents coming my way.

If you’ll permit me the illusion of God having some sort of physical form (which God allows me – I’ve told Him about it), I crawled up on His lap, certain of my welcome, and snuggled in pretty early in my childhood. In some real, yet indescribable – much as I try - way, I felt God's presence. Peaceful and serenely happy and easy to be around. We loved each other.

In some ways, that sums it up – that childish simplification of God and how I think of Him. We love each other.

It rings with such profound truth for me, and you can relate it to being told something as a child and accepting it as truth, or relating the idea of God to the idea of family. And if I loved my family, which I did, then what I feel for God is an extension of that love. Or, more likely in my mind now, it’s the reverse. The inherent love I have for God extends to those around me.

For some reason, I remember this youthful exchange. Always have. My fear from the prayer, looking up at Mom as she explained it to me, then feeling utterly safe when she left for her own bedroom. Because I wasn’t alone. God was there.

So when someone asks about how faith reconciles with science? Good question, but for me there’s no good answer. Science came so far after God that there was never a question for me about His existence or fitting Our relationship in with a new set of beliefs. We were constant. Science was the concept that had to fit around that.

While it starts here – the day I remember really loving God back, because He’d loved me for awhile already, it certainly doesn’t finish here. But for now, in part 1 of what I see as a 5 part series, it’s easy and exquisite and true.

We love each other.