**Five Minute Friday is an initiative set up by Lisa-Jo Baker over at Surprised by Motherhood. The basic premise is to take the word Lisa-Jo gives and write, non-stop for 5 minutes. Then you stop and post. Read more about it here.
Nothing
GO
“There is nothing you can do that will make me love you less.”
I remember hearing these words spoken over me in prayer when I was 15, and regularly since. I have been blessed with a wonderful family, an idyllic childhood. I have always known I was loved. But sometimes it is hard to feel like you make people proud, whether family, friends, or others.
We are all just so very different. Each of us have different dreams, hopes, fears, talents. Perhaps we might have a plan that is different to what our parents, sisters, brothers, friends, or others had for us. Perhaps we are those parents, siblings or friends who watch those we love make different choices to us and feel like they are the wrong ones.
But perhaps they are not wrong. Perhaps they are just that…different.
“There is nothing you can do that will make me love you less.”
Do I truly believe that of God? If I feel I’ve let others down doing what I believe to be right, then do I know that letting them down doesn’t mean I’ve let God down?
And when I do let Him down, which I inevitably do, can I accept the forgiveness He so readily extends? Can I come before Him and lift my head to His, knowing that the look I will receive is not one of disappointment or judgement, but of unconditional love?
“There is nothing you can do that will make me love you less.”
Nothing separates me from His Love. Scriptures promise that. He whispers that to me so often. I may never completely understand it, but I am starting to accept it.
But there’s another side to these words that I have struggled with for a long time, that I am still working through…
“There is nothing you can do that will make me love you more.”
This beautiful, unconditional love, this gift, this mercy, this grace – I cannot earn it. I don’t deserve it.
But He gives it anyway.
It doesn’t give me a license to live my life separate from God, or to not give the way I live my life and the choices I make a second thought. Of course not. If I choose to be a Christian in all senses of the word, there is already a choice I am making about what kind of life I will live.
But it is not the trying that will make God love me. He loves me anyway. And when I try on my own and realize, yet again, that I cannot do it that way, He welcomes me back with open arms and teaches me that that life is attainable, but it is on His terms, in His strength, in His grace.
That is the beauty of our God. He gave us free will and independence, but He never said we had to do it alone. And so, perhaps, dependence on Him is the better choice after all.
“There is nothing you can do to make me love you less. There is nothing you can do to make me love you more.”
Nothing.
STOP
