“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen,”
Ephesians 3: 20-21
Hello again, friends, and thank you, again, for reading this. I admit, it still feels strange to post, but I pray, of course, for grace—both from you, for the fact that I’m trying my hand at this, and from my God, that it might point back towards that God.
This week, I have been preparing to head back to Nashville, and this past Wednesday in particular was a long and wild day for me. It was a day of finally releasing my white-knuckled grip on my old plans. And, it was a day of watching a set of new plans spring up quite unexpectedly in their place. It was a day of joy, of nerves, of emails, and, thus, of a happy kind of total exhaustion.
That night, as I showered, my mom knocked on the shower door. I peeked my head out, and I saw her, standing there, holding a ripe peach.
“Your dad wants you to eat this cold peach.”
“What?””
“Your dad wants you to eat this cold peach.”
“Why?”
“Because he says they’re good, and it’ll be messy, so the shower is the best place to eat it.”
Reader, like any girl who has grown up in the South, I cannot resist a peach, so I accepted and took my cold peach back in the hot shower with me. And, as I stood there, in the strange tableau of biting into a cold, sweet peach in a hot, sweet-smelling shower, it hit me very tangibly how much my father loved me. It hit me that, when he was having a good peach, he immediately sent me one to have in a hot shower.
As I thought of my dad and his cold peach, I began to think: if my father’s love looks like a cold peach in a hot shower, could that mean that God the Father’s love is a cold-peach-in-a-hot-shower kind of love?
In this season, which has been, for me, one of intense disruption and often intense mourning or anger over what I have not been given or what I have been denied, it has been easy for me to envision God as withholding, or stingy. I sometimes imagine that God delights in keeping good things from me, or in punishing me without reason. It has been easy to see every loss in my life as a targeted attack from a uncaring God.
But as I experienced the love my father had for me, I began to think, friends, that God’s paradigm might be like my dad’s. All day, my father had helped me sign forms and make major, next-season-of-life-trajectory decisions, and, yet, at the end of the day, he still wanted to give me one more good gift.
God’s love is like that. God sees us and constantly says, “One more good gift!” God’s paradigm, when it comes to us, is not a paradigm of withholding or stinginess, nor is it a paradigm of transaction and earning. No, I think God’s paradigm is one of abundance. From God’s storehouses and in God’s eyes, there are infinite gifts to give us. In 1 Corinthians, Paul describes it this way: “However, as it is written:
‘What no eye has seen,
what no ear has heard,
and what no human mind has conceived ‘—
the things God has prepared for those who love him—’
these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.” That magnitude—that inconceivable type of magnitude—is the magnitude of God’s goodness toward us.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I am no prosperity Gospel preacher. This idea of God loving to give us good gifts is not a portrait of a God who pours our material blessings and never says no. Anyone who’s been doing this praying thing for any amount of time knows that is not the case. Our world is broken, and so we find ourselves often mired in pain and hurt and grief.
Yet, I am finding that it is God’s chief delight to take that brokenness and wring from it brilliance. It has been helpful for me to remember that, when Paul writes, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose,” he describes a radical commitment on God’s behalf to give to us abundantly. He describes a world-order in which nothing—no loss or no hurt—can get in the way of God expressing God’s love to us. What he describes is a God who is determined to use each and every part of our realities to demonstrate that God has seen us and known us and made us and and loves us.
I don’t think I am overstepping when I say, to you, that, as far as I can tell, no matter what loss you find yourself enmeshed in, God has decided to use it to bless you in ways you cannot yet imagine—in ways of purpose, in ways of presence, and, quite possibly, in ways of peaches.
Thank you, again, for reading.
Sending you all love and prayer and good vibes,
Molly Kate Hance
Molly Kate Writes 