The Love that doesn’t depend on me believing in it all the time

Now and again life fills up when you aren't looking and then overflows all over your other plans. This blog has been one of the casualties of a week that has been busy, mostly away from home. C S Lewis once complained about the disruptive impact of his brother's alcoholism on Lewis's plans for academic peace and quiet, and his desire for freedom from the interruption of other people's demands, needs, presence. Then he wrote one of the wise lines that helps us tolerate such selfishness in a scholar writer Christian whom Christians either love or dislike – and some of his attitudes are thoroughly dislikeable, from snobbery, to chauvinism to the use of wit to diminish others. On the other hand he could be unusually compassionate, unexpectedly tender, and was just as likely to use his intelligence to lift up and encourage.

The line is in the volume of letters, They Stand Together, a book I once lent, and never saw again. I asked for it and the borrower swore they returned it. I swore he didn't, and maybe I also swore! Anyway as Lewis pulled himself back from complaint and criticism to compassion and accepted inconvenience on his brother's behalf, he wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves, "I often wish life would get back to normal, and then I realise this is normal". And I suppose the wisdom in that is to accept that normal cannot ever mean problem free, obligation free, change free. Wouldn't endless normality be tedious, lacking the oxygen of new possibility, stagnating for want of movement. Isn't there a place in our lives, and maybe many of them, when a new normality has to be allowed to emerge, routines established but always provisionally, because life never stays the same?  I hope so. because that's where I am, trying to construct a new normality of life at two bases for a while. And no it isn't easy, it has its moments of self-doubt and other times of wishful thinking about a life less complex.

A number of times recently (7 weeks after moving), I've been asked if life has settled down now. No is the answer. How is it working out others ask. I don't know yet. Someone even asked, do you think you've done the right thing – disconcertingly I want to say "yes, and no"; or "it feels like no but I know it's yes"; or even more scary, how can you know how any big life-changing decision turns out till you make it, and then whether it was right or not, you live with it. I think that's more of what it means to live by faith than all the praying for certainties and signs. I've always admired those who look you in the eye and say " I have a peace about this". It's not my experience – I sometimes have to look right back and say, "I wish I had a peace about this". The truth is, for me, faith cannot be without risk, certainties and sign feel to me like safety nets for the untrusting, and seeking them more like risk assessments in matters of the soul.

So there are days when I wonder and worry; then there are days when I have a sense that the new way of life is workable but needs working at; other times I push in the John Michael Talbot CD in the car and sing loudly along with, "And he shall bear you up, on eagle's wings"; and then there are emails and comments from students who talk about their own life changing decisions, and their appreciation and gratitude, and share what for them is also scary times, loss of normality – and then  you begin to realise that loss of normality, and working at making our lives work, and taking risks because life is for movement and growth, and change and is a gift for giving which can't be lived under a canopy of certainties, all these are in fact the normal way a human life of faith is to be lived.

Lewis was right – no point waiting for life to become normal. What we are living is normal – and in the normality the faithfulness of God which for all Gods durable lovingkindness, is a love that manages to be constant without tedium, supporting the heart without dominating the will, allowing risk and freedom and room for error and never for a nana-second wavering in a love that is eternal, self-giving and ever responsive to where we are in our lives, wherever we are. To God, eternal love is normal – to us, it is that eternal love that means however safe or scary, however hurt or whole, however good or bad life turns out, and however unsure we are of decisions made and consequences lived with, eternal love doesn't change. It might feel like it. There are hard places and barren roads, and frightening corners enough at this stage of my life journey to make me think twice at least about talking up my own faith in God's durable, faithful love. But behind all my uncertainties; beneath all my shaken foundations; around all my questions and hesitations, there is a Love that doesn't depend on me believing in it all the time. It just is. Ands because of it, I just is! 

……………………….

The detail from the Book of Kells is included because I think it's wonderful. No other reason, it is simply beautiful and deserves to be enjoyed.