Finding God’s Love in
Un-safe Places
Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers
over a multitude of sins. 1 Pet. 4:8
I was recently thinking about all the people God used in
scripture to carry out his purposes and the thought occurred to me, I wouldn’t
have picked most of them out of a line up and trusted them to do the job if I
had known the flaws in them revealed in their stories. Then later I thought about some of the
people God has used to encourage, build and restore my life. If I had known how fallible they were I
may not have trusted them to love me and influence me the way I did. I may not have benefited by their
wisdom, gifting and most of all their love. Then a few days later I had the notion that if others knew
how flawed I am they might not trust me and the gifts I have to influence love
and healing in them.
It is very important to me to be a safe person and it’s important
for us to look for safety in people before we trust them. But sometimes we use the “safety” card
to avoid letting people in. We
keep looking for the perfectly safe person before we trust anyone. The result is we are left isolated from
God’s love and meaningful relationship with others. This keeps us in control trusting self instead of God. What if God sent us a Moses to rescue
us? He was a killer and a former
member of the enemy’s team. Or a
David; he was a murder, adulterer and a terrible father and husband. But these chosen ones were sent by God
and empowered to be a force for him.
The truth is that trust is risky business and complete trust
is usually foolishness so that makes it a little difficult when we are trying
to discern whom we can trust. We
need to remember that ultimately we are putting our trust in God, because I can
tell you with a great degree of confidence that everyone you have ever trusted
is not completely trustworthy, yet they were able to share God’s love and Grace
with you and you were able to receive it.
The goal is not to completely trust a person, only God gets
that from us and most of us struggle with that. The goal is to trust what God wants to give us through
others. We are trusting God when
we chose to receive His gifts of love and grace flowing through imperfect
people, just as God trusts and empowers imperfect people like us to love others.
So the next time we here the words, “where is God?” We can
remind ourselves that He’s in us wanting to reach out and care for others, and
He’s in others wanting to reach out and care for us.
