“Let us keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, on whom our faith depends from beginning to end.”
~Hebrews 12:2a (TEV).
Change causes us the temptation to worry, because everywhere about us circumstances are in flux; times are impossible to predict. The people we relate with today are not always the people we’ll relate with a year from now.
Whilst circumstances change and people come in and go out of our lives, it’s good to be reminded of our soul’s connection with God and that that never changes.
We are blessed when we spend intimate times with the Lord, as we acknowledge the truth that when we have the Spirit’s Presence with us we have no need of anything else.
Let’s check that thought.
God is All We Need
Our loved ones are given to us—and we to them—for our mutual enjoyment and safekeeping (as far as it’s humanly possible), so part of the relationship is for our blessing and part is for theirs.
Life is about the duty to love, and in that, we’re loved—others love us and we love them. God underpins such love; indeed, he commands it. God is love and he’s designed creation around love.
But as love lands in its most basic form, we have to recognise there are temporary manifestations of love—that shift, ebb and flow—and there’s the permanence of God’s love, woven beyond time into the eternal realm.
As we might focus on our losses around love—the fading into nothingness, except memory, of these temporary manifestations—we’re never more reminded of love’s permanence in God.
It might be difficult to grasp, but God is all we need because God is all we have.
Soul’s Link with God
Our souls are linked in love with God—an unchanging and unchangeable reality.
So, as we worship God by focusing intently on the permanence of the Spirit’s love, we can be reminded of our safety with God in eternity, and even as that reality stands now—eternal life also being a concept lived here and now (John 17:3).
About those losses that pain us, many questions of life are raised—things beyond our present comprehension.
Why does life hurt so much as it changes?
It’s because of love.
The eternal binding of our souls to God is also somehow entrapped in an oft-broken world that cannot respect, understand, or achieve, the entirety of God’s love.
As difficult as it might be, only with God—only with need of the Spirit—is this contention acceptable.
As we fix our minds, hearts, thoughts and feelings on Jesus we find a moment’s respite from the changes tending upon our lives. Only when we cling to that Rock will we find our changing worlds peaceable.
The very presence of change in our worlds propounds that which never changes—God’s love and the sealing of our souls in that love.
© 2011 S. J. Wickham.
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