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

by Savannah Guthrie

It’s worth taking a moment just to ponder it. How we feel about our kids is how God feels about us. The way we adore them. The way they make our hearts leap with joy. The way we revel in their personalities and gifts and quirks. The way we glory at their milestones and accomplishments, no matter how minor.

we don’t have a wide enough perspective. We are only human. We don’t have the multidimensional vantage point of God,

God’s feelings for us have nothing to do with our feelings toward him. His thoughts toward us have nothing to do with our thoughts toward him.

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 can remain in the memory of being loved by God—and

Marriage is an act of will and volition: deciding that you love that person, and that person loves you—every day. A relationship with God is just that—a relationship.

Whatever we encounter—a difficult person, a disturbing event, a confounding scripture—if our surface reaction or immediate takeaway is inconsistent with the unassailable fact of God loving us, then we must keep looking. 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.

(Luckily, God is not passive-aggressive.)

When you don’t have words, use what you do have. Pray with your imagination.

When we count our blessings and remember what we are thankful for and what is good in our lives, we are the beneficiaries. It lifts our spirits and fills us with joy.

fear will always leave out one crucial factor: the sweet, saving presence of God himself.

His trajectory is of ever-increasing intimacy and communion with him. That’s it. Kind of simple, really.

“Test me in this,” says the LORD Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.” Malachi 3:10

While he was still a long way off. God does not wait for perfection before he forgives us. He does not require a changed life before he shows us mercy.

It was not hard to imagine that internal voice of reproach belonging to him.

And—if you’ve mistakenly attributed your self-scolding voice to God—it creates a distance from the very one you need most.

Free, even, from the well-meaning judgment of our families and coworkers and friends.

Am I earnestly asking? Or am I erecting obstacles to God for some other reason? Am I genuinely seeking information and understanding? Or am I trying to create distance?

But when our motives are a mess, we may find it harder to find him.

He doesn’t ask for blind faith.

When we work out our questions in the presence of God, answers may not be possible, but relationship can be.

One day I think we shall find out, but I believe we are incapable of understanding it at the moment, in the same way that a baby in the womb would lack the categories to think about the outside world.

Comfortable is not where the action is.

Even our wrong decisions can be redeemed; it’s never over. This choice or that choice isn’t the definitive end or the only possible beginning.

“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.”

Allow God to be as creative and original with others as he is with you.1

Mostly what God does is love you.