and fill ourselves with God
That may be difficult for some of us to accept, but then we really can’t help ourselves. After all, we are only human and think in human ways. But God is God and He sees things differently. Although far from a perfect analogy, perhaps one way to understand how God loves us is to look at how a mother loves a child. A mother will love her child no matter what, even if that child is uncommonly ugly, incredibly stupid, or guilty of committing a despicable crime. And so it is with God, only infinitely more so. God doesn’t love the sin, but He does love the sinner.
John Kirvan, author of Silent Hope: Living with the Mystery of God says that “God’s love — we have to repeat constantly to ourselves — is not a conditional love. It does not depend on what we do, but solely on the fact that we are. This is hard for us to believe because we keep measuring God by our standards…”
So if we cannot shut the door on God then why not toss the door away and let God “come on in and set a spell?” If God is always present why not accept Him into our lives and make Him feel welcome?
The problem for many of us is that we have no room for God, nowhere for Him to sit. We have filled our lives with earthly things; we have filled them with lots of ‘stuff’, all kinds of ‘stuff’, and there simply isn’t any room left for Him. As Meister Eckhart wrote some eight hundred years ago “To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God.”
When we understand that God loves us because we are, and not who we are, then we’re getting close. All we have left to do is empty ourselves of things and fill ourselves with God.
