Love Actually

A mate challenged me about a year and a half ago with the question “would you still love God if Jesus hadn’t risen from the dead?” At the time I blurted out some intellectual-sounding answer. Behind the "right" words coming out of my mouth, the rest of me was panic-ridden with the possibility that I didn’t love God to the extent I always thought I had. It was the first time I’d properly questioned why I loved God. If I even loved him. How I could possibly go about learning to love him. The more I thought about it, the more impossible it seemed, to love someone who wasn’t concrete. Who wasn’t about. I started pushing him away from my world. Pushing him further up into the sky. Viewing him as a powerful being chilling out above us somewhere who loved us dearly, but who expected us to work insanely hard at loving him back. I couldn’t bring myself to do that. I didn’t lose face, I kept the Christian act going, but I didn’t understand how to love Him. I begged God to teach me how to go about it, but the distance I’d put him at prevented me from seeing him anywhere.
Not sure entirely when or how it happened, but I accepted the situation. Or I just pushed the problem to the back of my mind and stopped thinking about it. I figured I would persevere with the whole Christian thing and have faith that it would make sense one day.
“Allah Allah Allah”
This song came on my iPod. By mewithoutYou. It’s a pretty feel-good song, singing away about how God is in everything. The penny dropped pretty loudly in my head. I had the whole concept of the nature of God muddled up. I was envisaging Him as being separate from the world, as a powerful force that looked over us. Major underestimation. God is in everything. He’s intertwined IN this world. He’s in that moment when I slowly feel myself warm up after I’ve got into a cold bed in a cold room. He’s in that first sip of a cup of tea. He’s in that excitement when I’m plummeting down the side of a mountain on a board. He’s in everything I love already. He’s the beauty of it all. I don’t need some secret theological doctrine to love some seemingly inaccessible God. He’s in me. He’s in the people around me. He’s in what I see. Now there’s a God I can’t help but love. God is love. And according to Hugh Grant, love actually is all around.