On God’s Love, Spiritual Discipline, and the Freedom of Patience

In Jesus and the Spirit the Father has shared with us God’s (the Holy Trinity’s) own life with us. Not just that God loves us, but much more than that. God is love, and we live in that love. There is not another face of God inconsistent with the face of Jesus. The Breath/Spirit of God is the Spirit of that Jesus shared with us. What we see in Jesus – this is what God is, really. Moreover, there is nothing more that the Father can give us. There is nothing more intimate than the Son and the Breath/Spirit of God. Everything we can receive has been given. There is nothing God is withholding, waiting for us to earn. Everything is given – what more can there be than the love that is God? The effect of what God has done in Jesus and given in the Spirit is still working its way through our lives and, indeed, the whole of creation. But we have been and are lavishly blessed by God. 

 To live into what has been so lavishly bestowed on us requires new habits of thought and feeling, and this means practicing the spiritual disciplines to allow the sense of the presence of God to blossom. That makes it sound like hard work. And while part of the Christian calling is to learn some new habits of awareness and gratitude, the answer is not always an intense discipline, but a freedom and patience that waits for God in our lives. This might sound strange, but often the less intense we are while faithfully engaging in the spiritual practices the more likely the presence of God will be unveiled in our life now and in our past. After all, joy can’t be manufactured, it is a gift.