Fiona and Terryl Givens from their book “All Things New” wrote:
God’s love, Their commitment to us, precedes any action on our part. When Jesus looked upon the rich young man,“beholding him, [he] loved him” (Mark 10:21). The sequence tells us everything: Jesus beheld him, and he loved him, before the young man decided to follow, or not to follow, the Lord—and independently of whatever decision he was yet to make. In Zenos’s allegory of the vineyard, the Lord nourishes his wild olive trees twenty-two times. Twenty-two times He persists in lovingly tending, pruning, cultivating, caring for and lavishing love care and effort on one single tree, a wild tree, that to all appearances is unresponsive to His efforts. As with us, His love precedes the coming of any fruit.
We believe it is slander against God to presume that their compassion is measured to our merit. The story of the prodigal son tells us otherwise. As Henry Nouwen writes,”I have come to know in a small way what it means to be a father who asks not questions, wanting only to welcome his children home.9 We are all prodigals, we have all wandered, and we all fall short of our potential—without exception. And yet, as David Bentley Hart writes,“The character of even the very worst among us is in part the product of external contingencies, and somewhere in the history of every soul there are moments when a better way was missed by mischance, or by malign interventions from without, or by disorders of the mind within, rather than by intentional perversity on the soul’s own part.10” Our Heavenly Parents are more generous with us than we are with ourselves because They are wiser than we are. This is why we might best understand mercy not as turning a blind eye to our actions but seeing them with a fully understanding eye.
As Nouwen reminds us,“Our brokenness has no other beauty but the beauty that surrounds it.”11 The love that envelopes us is not the based on our worthiness. It is not our merit that brings it forth. This love, unsolicited, is the miracle that tells us we have a permanent and cherished place in the universe. A friend wrote of the moment when from the depths of her own dark night of the soul, she experienced a blinding epiphany, a perfect realization of a God of absolute, non-judgmental love:
“I thought of Christ as a condemning being who demanded blind following, or else packed you off to burning abyss. I thought, if I were to feel anything it would be the disgust of a being who had seen my whole life in detail, knew the mountain of things I had done “wrong” in his book was repulsed. Instead, I felt something that will never leave me. My mind could not have manufactured it. If I could have invented something so beautiful, I would have done it a long time ago. I felt that everything about me and my life—every moment of grief, joy, heartache, trauma and darkness—was all perfectly understood and none of it was condemned. I didn’t feel guilted, shamed or rejected. I felt loved. Not in the watery way society often uses the word. It was deep as an ocean. It was rich as cream. It was without bounds or conditions.” 12
Perhaps, if we listen, we can hear the Healer’s words as the poet Alfred Tennyson did, consumed as he was by his own feelings of unworthiness:
Thou canst not move me from thy side,
Nor human frailty do me wrong. . . .
So fret not, . . .
That life is dashed with flecks of sin.
Abide. Thy wealth is gathered in,
When time hath sundered shell from pearl.13
