Love Makes the Difference

When it comes to children and spiritual truth, I’m never sure who’s the teacher and who’s the student. Such was the case during a conversation I had recently with my oldest granddaughter, Lauren.

“Gigi!” she said as she bounced into my house one Friday morning. (If you’ve spent any time lately around preschool girls, you know that all of their statements end in an exclamation points and that they run, skip, bounce, or hop everywhere. Walking is never an option.)

“I drew you a picture so you’d remember me while I’m in New-Ork.” She waved the masterpiece in her hand. “See, it’s you and me on a mountain, and I wrote my name on the bottom so you’d merember who drawed it.”

Taking the artwork from her hand, I squatted so I was eye-level to her happy face.

“You know something? I think about you every day. Every single day. You know why?”

She thought a moment, then said, “Because you love me?”

“Yup. Because I love you. And you know what? There’s someone else who thinks about you every single day. Can you guess who?”

She thought a little longer, following the trajectory of my thoughts.

“God?”

“Yup.”

Her blue eyes lit up with the success of nailing the correct answer.

“God thinks about you every single day . . . Do you know why?”

The pause was longer this time, but then, “. . . because God loves me?”

“Yes!” I said, and I told her that God never stops thinking about her because of that love for her.

When Jesus said we must become as little children to see the kingdom of God, I think he had in mind simple conversations like this one. If we, like little Lauren, accepted without conditions the fact that God loves us and never stops thinking about us, it would eliminate much of the angst we feel every day.

This circumstance I’m experiencing . . . if God loves me, then I can trust God to use it for good in my life.

This hard path I’m walking on . . . if God loves me, then I won't have to face it alone.

This heartache . . . if God loves me, then God can heal my heart and restore my joy.

What are you going through right now? Would it look different if you viewed it through the certainty of God’s love? Try it and see. Then trust, pray, and rest.

“See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are” (1 John 3:1, NIV).

Lori Hatcher is a blogger, inspirational speaker, and author of the Christian Small Publisher’s 2016 Book of the Year, Hungry for God … Starving for Time, Five-Minute Devotions for Busy Women. She’s also Gigi to three tiny humans. You’ll find her pondering the marvelous and the mundane on her blog, Hungry for God. . . Starving for Time .