Growing up, I think I basically imagined God as being somewhat akin to a General Authority. In my mind, he (male, of course) was a generally benevolent older man. He wasn’t mean, necessarily, but he did have very clear expectations of how people should act, and would be disappointed if you didn’t meet those expectations. He would lecture when necessary, if he felt like you needed it. He would be patient, sure, but he also had a clearly defined plan for you, and wasn’t very interested in your opinions or ideas about how things were going, because you needed to get on board and follow the plan. God didn’t particularly care about your feelings, for heaven’s sake; he cared about accomplishing his grand purposes. I mean, he might listen politely and maybe even acknowledge what you said, but ultimately he wanted you to get with the program and get over yourself.
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The Reckless Love of God
I suspect that a message that most human beings absorb growing up is that we should exercise some caution in our love. That love is always a risk, that it opens you up to being vulnerable, that you can get deeply wounded if you get too drawn in by love’s currents and run into troubled waters. That the people whom you love the most are also the ones who can hurt you the most. So we learn to hesitate, to look before we leap, to take care, to think in advance about what might go wrong. Sometimes we may let ourselves get swept up in it despite all this, an experience which can be both giddy and terrifying. But we also often build walls, sometimes as thick as we can make them, in hopes of protecting ourselves from getting too invested, from caring too much.