Continue to Love Me

Every once in a while something happens that makes me see how much God loves me. (I need to see that every once in a while, unfortunately.)

Anyway...a couple of mini-testimonies here:
First: One day we decided to take younger son to my church to get him prayed for. This is often a bit of a chore. But we managed. I had on this lovely red dress I had received hand-me-down from a friend. Then, for no reason I could think of, I changed from that dress into something else. Off we went to church. Son was quite a handful, all this wrestling him up to the altar. Then we got home. Some time later -- either the same day or the next-- I put on the red dress. I squatted to pick something up and the dress tore from the bottom to the top. Can you imagine what would have happened if I had worn that dress to church and had been struggling with younger son in front of church? Quite embarrasing.

Second: Back in the day I wrote a piece for a Norton anthology called LIFENOTES: Contemporary Writings by Black women. (Something like that. I forget the actual title.) The piece was called OREOBLUES and it was a sexual history. Looking back I shouldn't have written it. Well, I had it here in my bookcase for sixteen years and never really looked at it much. Once something is published, I kinda move on. One day, however, out of the blue I picked up the book and ripped out the essay I had written. For fear older son would see it and give me a hard time about it. (Older son was way immature at the time and we had told him we hadn't had sex before marriage. Okay, a lie, but well...) Anyway, I rip it out and put it at the bottom of the garbage bin. Then I returned the book to its usual place on the bookshelf. The very next day I found the book on my dining table. Son's college teacher had asked them to find a piece on Black memoirs. Kid had come home and found that on the bookshelf. Now.... was my heavenly father looking out for me or what?

He's done so many things for me, for all of us, without us asking. But the best memory I have of God's sweet love for me was the angel I saw. I always think of that angel...and how sweetly and conspiratorially and humorously he smiled at me. Like we were old friends. Honestly, like we were old pals who were winking at each other in the night. What a glorious and wonderful place heaven must be to contain beings who smile so lovingly at us like that!

If only we could take God at His word and understand His deep, deep, personal, caring love for us! Healings would flow for us, I think. Because so much of faith works through love. Us loving others, us loving ourselves (in the right way), us loving God, and Us knowing God's deep wonderful love for us. -C