Dear Jamie,
I've been doing a lot of thinking regarding how to respond to the news in your last e-mail. Overarching all my thoughts are the words that were among the last I was able to share with my mother on the day of her death: "I have loved you with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you (have continued My faithfulness to you)" (Jeremiah 31:3). I believe that it is God's love for us that is the most basic claim for a response from us to Him. In His love for us, He created every single one of us for a love relationship with Him. That's why within us all there is a "God-shaped vacuum."
I believe that we started off back in the garden of Eden able to fill that inner space within us with fellowship with our Maker. But the human race is no longer in that state of being able to be what we were originally created to be. Since we by our own choices to be independent of our Creator, and to reject Him as our "boss," have decided to "go it on our own" without Him, there have been consequences. And so we try to meet that innate, inner yearning with all kinds of things, perhaps seemingly good things, that will never be able to take the place of the only thing that "fits" there. Independence turns out to not be what it's touted to be. The reality is that independence from our very life-source is not a wise move!
I've been doing a lot of thinking regarding how to respond to the news in your last e-mail. Overarching all my thoughts are the words that were among the last I was able to share with my mother on the day of her death: "I have loved you with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you (have continued My faithfulness to you)" (Jeremiah 31:3). I believe that it is God's love for us that is the most basic claim for a response from us to Him. In His love for us, He created every single one of us for a love relationship with Him. That's why within us all there is a "God-shaped vacuum."
I believe that we started off back in the garden of Eden able to fill that inner space within us with fellowship with our Maker. But the human race is no longer in that state of being able to be what we were originally created to be. Since we by our own choices to be independent of our Creator, and to reject Him as our "boss," have decided to "go it on our own" without Him, there have been consequences. And so we try to meet that innate, inner yearning with all kinds of things, perhaps seemingly good things, that will never be able to take the place of the only thing that "fits" there. Independence turns out to not be what it's touted to be. The reality is that independence from our very life-source is not a wise move!
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