Devotional 3-3-10

Loving us in our Imperfection
Romans 8:39: neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

As many of you know I now live in Charlotte having moved for a new professional position in June of last year. What many of you do not know is that part of the plan for the move was that my parents would move from Waycross, GA to Charlotte also. The difficult part of the search for a new home in Charlotte was finding one that would have an area/apartment in which my parents could live. We found one that had an “in-law” suite. It consisted of a large bedroom, walk-in closet and bath with a much smaller sitting room. (Why not a small bedroom and larger sitting room is what I have been asking myself?)

Last week my parents spent the week with me in our new home and in their new “digs”. I spent a lot of time talking with my father about his early life, family members and end of life issues. As my mother slides further into her dementia, and my father grows frailer with his congestive heart failure and macular degeneration our conversations have grown more serious. When my friends ask me why I am bringing my father into my home, I have no real answer except, “it is the thing to do.” I think I am just as surprised as others that I would bring my parents to live with me.

The Sunday before Ash Wednesday was Valentine’s Day. The minister at the church I was visiting that Sunday made the topic of love her focus in her sermon. She tied the holiday with the holy day. It was an interesting joining of cultural, religious, and theological meaning. The sermon set me to thinking about my parents and this journey we are beginning. As my father told stories about his father, I realized that my grandfather was not a very loving person. I am well aware and have documented the reality that the sternness of my father has created distance between him and his four sons. I reflected on the relationship I have with my two children and the stories they tell about me. Their view of me is certainly a different perspective than the one I hold of myself.

I realized that I am inviting my parents into my home because I love them. My wife is allowing them into her home because she loves me. She is well aware how just how fallible my parents can be and are. I reflected on the reality that I am a finite and limited human being. I am full of my own insecurities and inadequacies and yet I know I am loved by my wife of thirty-eight years and my 35 and 33 year old children. I am also loved by my grandchildren who still think that Papa can do anything.

Lent is a time of getting in touch with the finite, limited, sinful part of ourselves that we would like to keep hidden. We are to stare at it eyeball to eyeball and see that part of ourselves we hope no one else knows. We are ashamed of it and like Adam and Eve want to keep it hidden. Yet with all the limitations I have, if I can love my father as mean and ornery as he has been and sometimes is, and with the humanness of their personhood, if my wife and children can love me as mean and ornery as I am sometime, how can God not love, accept, and forgive me.

Maybe that is what Paul had in mind in Romans 8:39. Maybe he realized just how mean and ornery he was and realized that the people that surrounded him loved him in spite of himself. Maybe that made him realizes that the power of love is not just a human thing to be celebrated on Valentine’s Day but that it is a divine thing that comes into focus during Lent and celebrated on Easter Sunday and every Sunday. Maybe that is what made him realize that nothing can separate us from the love of God

Rev. David C. Johnson