Mostly What God Does: Reflections on Seeking and Finding His Love Everywhere

by Savannah Guthrie

I like to tell people about the God I know. The one whose hand rests gently on my shoulder, whose presence I can feel behind and beside me when I’m under pressure. The one whose persistent but kind nudging can prod me into perspective, whose forbearance and tenderness can coax me into change. The one who surprises and delights me with the imagination of his creation and the beautiful potential of his humanity. The one whose revelations spark my intellect and ignite my passions and purpose. The one who melts me with unexpected favor and unmerited generosity. The one who holds me, firmly and purposefully, when the weight of my disappointments and setbacks threatens to crush.

Mostly what God does is love us.

Even as a child, I grappled with the last part of the verse. “Love your neighbor” was an easy enough concept to grasp (not so easy to do but easy to understand). But “as yourself”? I found the notion perplexing. I thought God could have used a better example, maybe a commandment like, “Love your neighbor as you love ice cream.” Because I didn’t “love myself” that way at all.

Less globally, more personally: feeling loved when confronting setbacks and disappointment and loss is damn near (can we curse in a book about faith?) impossible. It’s all well and good to feel loved by God when things go your way. When you struggle—with need or conflict or hurt—forget it. Forget about feeling loved by God; these are the moments we feel opposed by God. We feel abandoned by him. And equally as challenging, perhaps, are all the in-between moments, the monotonous days in and days out—ordinary, repeated twenty-four-hour units of to-dos and to-don’ts, go heres and go theres stacked up one after the other, from day to week to month to year. Sure, God loves us, but honestly, who has time to sit around soaking in it?

How do we summon and maintain that feeling of being loved? It’s pretty simple. We don’t. Because it’s not a feeling; it’s a fact. To “remain in God’s love” is a frame of mind. We use our brains to remind our hearts. We may not be able to sustain the emotion of being loved by God, but we can remain in the knowledge of being loved by God. We can remain in the memory of being loved by God—and let that sow confidence within us that nothing about his posture toward us has changed.

If our surface reaction is inconsistent with God loving us, we must go deeper. Because his loving us is a certainty.

God is here, now, and his speaking to us does not depend on our speaking to him. His thoughts about us do not depend on our thoughts about him. He doesn’t wait to come until he is called. We don’t summon him with our pious practices and diligent spiritual routines. They help us tune in. They open the window through which his light is ready to shine. But he is present to us, whether or not we are present to him.

He doesn’t even need words from us. Just a sigh, a tear, or a whimper. He knows. What an amazing resource we have in a God who already understands our whole history, our intricate emotional fabric, our every inner thought. We don’t have to explain anything. It’s like having a Super Therapist—or as the Bible puts it, a “Wonderful Counselor” (Isaiah 9:6).

In our moments of weakness, in our moments of deep need and helplessness, sometimes the best we can do is just to come. Don’t worry. He can work with that.

This we know: God meets us in prayer. He said so, definitively: “Call to me and I will answer you.” It is a bedrock promise. You place the call. Yours is one he will always pick up.

This moment, this pain, this anguish—this is the path to freedom. This is the road that will lead you out. Because this is what will force change. This is how I am rescuing you.

God knows our love language. Think about the times you felt touched by him. It could be through a person, an interaction, a song, or a scene in a movie. God knows what moves us. He knows how to connect to our hearts. And words don’t constrict him. Sometimes he doesn’t need words at all.

The shepherd calls the sheep. In its simplest form, God is always calling. He knows our name. If we really listen, we will know his voice. And always, boiled down to its very essence, he is saying one thing: “Come with me.”

God’s words are meant for this: to be tasted, lingered over, and savored. His words are meant to be ingested and absorbed into our bloodstream. They’re meant to become part of us.

If praise is a garment, who is wearing it? We are. We are ones who are adorned. God tells us to praise him not for what it does for him but for what it does for us.

Wherever you are in this moment and however you feel, if you want to immediately alter the atmosphere, if you want to instantly change the air, praise him.

Great wisdom and great comfort come from doing what the psalmist suggested: look up, look out, look to the beyond. And what do we see? Help on the way—coming from the hills and high places. Rescue. Hosanna in the highest. We see God—who he is, his essence, his character, his methods. We see him in charge and in control. We see him focused and paying attention. We see him: Maker, Creator, Author, Provider—on earth as it is in heaven. God is there and he is good. Perspective. The heavenly kind.

God is the judge of my flaws, and he promises mercy. God is in charge of my safety and protection, and he promises eternal life. God is the guardian of my heart and well-being, and he shows tenderness and loving-kindness to all he has made—including me.

But God isn’t looking for perfect words or pious exaltations. He isn’t looking for posturing or pretense. He is looking for the mess. In other words, he is looking for us.

Believing is beautiful. God is in the blessing business. The blessing is God himself. And that is pure joy.

When we come back, broken and ashamed, God is waiting. It does not matter where we’ve been or what we’ve done. He does not scold or rebuke, demand an account, or exact retribution. He is just overjoyed we are home. Arms stretched wide, the posture of the cross. “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” Jesus said (Matthew 9:13). He waits for us, with love.

There is no greater feeling than confronting and facing your weaknesses and shortcomings, and finding out that you are loved, accepted, and forgiven anyway. It is better than telling yourself you’re perfect or good enough or at least better than [insert much more terrible other person]. And it is much, much better than your self-condemnation, the merciless beatdowns applied to yourself. We can be honest with ourselves about who we are, because of who he is. The one who sets us free. God is here. So we are free.

God doesn’t just forgive our failings and then let the memory of them hang around, tormenting us. He takes our guilt far away and replaces it with his peace.

Salvation has two parts, not one. Repent, then rest. Rest in the knowledge that you are loved and forgiven and embraced. Recline.

I see that receiving God’s grace is the ultimate bonding experience with him. It connects us to him eternally with a cord of our choosing—not a rope or shackle but a link, a tie, an attachment. We will tug on that line again and again. We will need his mercy over and over. We will indeed call on him all the days of our lives—out of choice and out of love.

I do believe that one day the rights will be wronged, the broken will be made whole, the unloved will be fully loved, and we will all be fully known.

This is the ultimate “Why, God?” for me—the ultimate threat to my faith. I can imagine no greater challenge to our belief than when something devastating happens to us or, even worse, someone we love.

You are simultaneously more sinful and flawed than you ever dared believe, yet more loved and accepted than you ever dared hope.”

In this immense and unfinished work, God invites us to participate. You. Me. Us. God pays human beings the ultimate compliment by drafting us into his Great Commission. He deputizes us as his agents—to spread the love that we see in him everywhere.

The kind of love Jesus calls us to does not dabble or keep its distance; it does not dip in from time to time. It plunges deeply and invests intently. It’s the way he loves us, after all. His is an all-consuming love.

To discover your purpose, you probably need to get uncomfortable. I don’t know why, but the most fruitful seasons of blossoming and growth are always, always, inevitably, on the other side of risk. On the other side of a bold choice. On the edge, waiting for you, on the other side of your fear.

Even our wrong decisions can be redeemed; it’s never over.

Here is what I know. Your obstacles, your broken places, the spots where you’ve healed, the things you’ve overcome—this is the source of your strength and also the source of your beauty. You will come to a time when you say, “I’m so glad that thing I feared or dreaded happened because I would not be me without it. I wouldn’t have learned compassion or empathy. I would not have known the determination or grit deep within me.”

Through risk, through adversity, God reveals himself and our true selves. Our purpose, our significance, our meaning. That path, we cannot ruin.

I like to speak; I like to write. I love the feel of words on my lips or on my fingertips when I type (so much that I have wished all my life I could learn another language—even more words to have at my disposal!). Writing, speaking, persuading, teaching—this is my true north. Sometimes, though—too many times to count—my tongue has been sharp. Quick, harsh, searing. Clever or funny at the expense of someone else—and the cost ultimately to myself. “Set a guard over my mouth” (Psalm 141:3), the scripture says, and no one needs this prayer more than I. When I was a sassy teenager, my big mouthy mouth used to drive my father crazy. He even started calling me “Last Word” because I kept talking in any argument or conflict. I just couldn’t . . . shut . . . up. Even when it was for my own good. Even when I was digging myself deeper. Even when I stopped making sense. Had to get in that last word.

God has given me more than a big mouth. He has given me a voice. He has woven together my life into a surprising tapestry I never could have imagined, far more than I deserve, far beyond what I would ever have hoped for or dared to dream. I am no missionary. Every day I inevitably fall short. But God’s mercies are new every morning.

And then she said: “The paradox of faith is the love of God that creates us to be in awe of God, is also in awe of us . . . . God is taken by you.”6 There it is again. Mostly what God does is love us. May love have the last word.