Tangible Love

My hatred, God’s love

Sometimes I get so frustrated with my physical weaknesses that I despise this flesh that I’m trapped in and yearn for something better. One day, during one of these “woe is me, my life is so tough” moments I mentally repeat my mantra, “I hate my body.”

Then a thought comes to mind, “But God loves me. He loves my body just the way it is.” Yes, He’d like to see me taking better care of it and refusing to use it as an instrument of sin, but that doesn’t stop Him from loving it. He loves it more deeply, more passionately, more consistently than I ever will. Always. In all circumstances. Without any reservations.

God’s love isn’t simply a vague, mushy, abstract feeling. It’s a real, concrete, tangible love that actively touches every part of my life. I see it in the beauty of His creation. I see it in my relationships with friends and family, in the provision of my daily bread, in fulfilling activities like teaching and writing. Most of all, I see it in the sacrifice He made to save His children.

God doesn’t have to heal my body to demonstrate that love. In His compassion, He can and will use my flesh with all its weaknesses—and even because of its weaknesses—to benefit myself and others (Romans 8:28).

God’s heart

When I’m feeling discouraged and frustrated, I also experience God’s love for me in another way. The Bible is full of examples of His tender concern for the afflicted, the vulnerable, and the oppressed.

The Old Testament law demanded equal justice for the rich and the poor (Leviticus 19:15). It required His people to treat the foreigners among them with the same dignity and respect that they showed their fellow Israelites (Exodus 22:21). It instructed them to leave some of the grain lying around when they harvested their fields, so those in need could collect it for themselves (Leviticus 23:22).

These laws aren’t just a bunch of impersonal rules given to make society run better. They provide a revelation of God’s heart. They give us an illustration of how His compassion transcends our expectation that those with power (and who has more power than God?) will favor the strong, the rich, and the beautiful. In the New Testament, Jesus clearly demonstrates His concern for the afflicted, the vulnerable, and the oppressed in all of His words and actions.

This is the love God shows me when I’m proclaiming my hatred for my own body. He sees my suffering. He knows how much I’m hurting. He responds with His comfort and compassion (2 Corinthians 1:3-4). How well would I really know His love if I didn’t experience it at times like this?

A human example

There was once a couple who had a ten-year-old son. They enjoyed finding opportunities to demonstrate their love for him in tangible ways. They provided for his physical needs. They listened to him as he shared his discoveries and his complaints. They took his ideas and desires into account when planning vacations. As much as possible, they used thoughtful discussions rather than punishment when he crossed the boundaries that they had set for him. (And yes, they occasionally ignored him when he needed their attention or lost their tempers and yelled at him, but that has nothing to do with the point of this story.)

Their son was so healthy so much of the time that he only missed one or two days of school each year. But one Saturday, when he was ten years old, he was violently ill. Vomiting and diarrhea wracked his body for hours.

He’d spent the previous night at a friend’s house, drinking can after can of Dr. Pepper to keep himself awake. His parents knew that even a few ounces of a caffeinated beverage could upset his stomach, so they took care of him at home, assuming his reaction would run its course, rather than rushing him to the emergency room. His mother sat with him patiently for the entire day, cleaning up after every mess and reassuring him that he didn’t need to keep telling her how sorry he was for making those messes.

Why did he insist on apologizing? Because he didn’t know, until that moment, that a mother’s love doesn’t just mean providing good things for her child. It includes sitting with him when he’s sick, comforting him when he’s feeling miserable, cleaning up after the grossest substances his body could produce. The bond between that mother and son was strengthened that day in a way that could only happen through his suffering.

God’s voice

How well do I know God’s love in the good times? I can appreciate Him and praise Him and thank Him as He provides for my needs and even goes beyond those needs to bless me with special relationships and delightful experiences. But I gain a greater understanding of just how deep His compassion for me really goes when He takes care of me during the bad times, as that mother ministered to her child.

C. S. Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” One of the things that He’s shouting in that pain is the good news of His intense love for us. We will not hear it any other way.

And yet we seem to want the kind of God who demonstrates His love by always giving us even more than we really need and by preventing us from getting hurt. One of the popular arguments against the loving, powerful God of the Bible (which Lewis discusses in detail in his book) is that either He doesn’t love us enough to protect us from suffering or He’s not powerful enough to stop that suffering before it hits us.

People insist that they would believe in and worship a God who never allowed any trouble to enter their lives. But that’s the God that Satan knew as an angel in heaven. That’s the God that Adam and Eve knew in the Garden of Eden. And yet they still rebelled. Was it at least partly because they hadn’t seen the fullest expression of His love, as we see it when we suffer?

God loves me in real, tangible, active ways. He treasures my broken body just the way it is. He uses it to bless others and to demonstrate how deeply He cares for me. Maybe I can learn to love it too.