My Least Favorite Vegetable

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind…And Love others as much as you love yourself. Matt 22:37-40

This tends to be one of those pep rally Christian verses…You know, Ra Ra, let’s love God BETTER…Let’s DO things for Him!! We all get riled up and run around starting small groups and serving food at homeless shelters. For a whole week we do a really good job managing our behavior…But the thing is, actually this verse isn’t at all about doing things. It’s about LOVING. Which begs the question…

Do I find God loveable?

Or do I have an allegiance to Him? Or do I serve Him? Service and allegiance are WAY different than loving.

I, in fact, think that sometimes I treat God like lima beans- my least favorite vegetable (or is it a legume?). I either don’t eat lima beans at all, or if I’m stuck at someone else’s house and worried about being rude, I can kinda eat one or two and shuffle the rest around so that it LOOKS like I did a good job eating them. That’s what I do to God- I either just don’t even think about Him, or if I’m in one of those situations where it’s unavoidable, I do the bare minimum to look good and on top of my game…but mostly I’m just shuffling around trying to hide the junk.

If I don’t actually find God to be loveable, then there’s no way I will love Him. And if I don’t love Him, it seems that probably I’m missing the boat.

So if I don’t love God, apparently whatever it is that I’ve been doing to serve Him and to be allegiant to Him are NOT effective ways of making me love Him. So I need to do something else.

When I hear the phrase, however, You need to do something else, all my little bells start clanging…My tendency in the past was to stop and shout, “We cannot EARN our grace. We can’t DO things to have us love Him.” But actually, I think very often I confused WORKING and EARNING. God is really definite on the point that He is opposed to us earning our grace. But He is NOT opposed to us working. The truth is that getting to know God is work. Building a relationship with Him doesn’t happen through osmosis by hanging out with Christians who seem to have it together. Building a relationship doesn’t happen through God Super-Wammo Zapping you. It takes effort and time and more effort to get to know someone. To get to know Him.

And, frankly, I would propose that if we don’t find God loveable, it’s us, not Him that needs to change.

So how do we change, in our deepest core, how we see God? How can I learn to see God as loveable?

That seems to be the elusive magic question, doesn’t it? One that I really don’t have answer to….But I suppose, I guess one thing that was sort of helpful for me was reading the Gospels all the way through- quickly- like a Twilight book. Not nitpicking over theological points, but seeing Jesus as person. By seeing his tenderness. By seeing his in-your-face statements of justice. By weeping over his humiliating death.