The Creator loves us and wants us to have joy
February 26, 2011
The Bible says my Creator has incredible love for me. One example of its gracious, cherishing love is in the 23rd Psalm (“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want … my cup runneth over … surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life”).
What do such religious promises really mean?
I imagine this: My first ancestor was created about four billion years ago. It was one-celled life. From it, I and all forms of existence originated. The creative process that caused life has labored unceasingly ever since. For eons a generous, benevolent, intelligent goodness labored until it brought me, with my intricate, complicated, 70-trillion-cell body, into being.
Its ability to develop and improve gave me astonishing gifts that demonstrate its adoration for me. They include phenomenal wonders — sight, hearing, feeling, a fabulous, self-healing body. It gave me conceptual consciousness and incredible thinking powers. I believe they enable me to be a creator, too.
The sun only knows how to give light and heat. In the same vein, my Creator unstintingly gives me only love.
But I can hide from sunlight. And I can ignore and forget the perfect love my Creator unceasingly extends to me.
However, on the cloudiest day, if I fly high enough I will be in pure sunlight. And even when I’m miserable, if I remember to be open to my Creator’s love, it will flow into my life.
Just as one drop of water contains the essence of the ocean’s vastness, I as an individual am a distinct, personal inheritor of the immeasurable, loving goodness that made me.
I ask, “What is the Creator’s nature?”
Incredible intelligence and perfect love. I include those wonders for I am its creation, its loved child. I marvel at the lavish love that is my true identity. I announce it as my real being. I proclaim it as who I truly am.
I love my children. They resemble me. I too am cherished by my adoring Creator. My nature reflects its loving parenthood. I acknowledge my inheritance and enjoy that love. I believe the greatest power in the world wants to give me all that I need — health, strength, security, companionship, wealth, desirable employment. Its compassionate generosity is greater than I can imagine.
I acknowledge love as my nature and creator. I declare that it lives in me. I open myself to it so it can guide, support and direct me into constant, abundant joy.
Love wants me to be magnificent, because by my inheritance of its nature, that is who I am.
Many times a day I stop and think, “My Creator — the cause of all goodness, the maker of nature’s wonders and my incredible, regenerative body — loves me, cherishes me, adores me. It wants its joyous goodness to fill every second and event of my day — to make my life wonderful. It can do so, because it is powerful, intelligent, generous. It is all in all.
And then, I accept it. I go my way guided, happy and blessed.
The Rev. Edgar Peara is minister emeritus of an Illinois Unitarian Universalist Church and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Eugene. This column is coordinated by Lane Interfaith Alliance to offer inspiration, share personal spiritual experiences and bring a deeper understanding of individual faith perspectives with the intention of blessing our community and the world. For more information, visit www.laneinterfaithalliance.org or call 541-344-0430.