Seeing Myself Through God’s Loving Gaze

Human love is a tiny opening through which we glimpse something immeasurably larger: God’s loving gaze.

What the Love We Give Can Teach Us to Receive

There is a moment that happens almost every Monday when my granddaughter, Clara, walks through my door. I am simply thrilled that she is there. It does not matter what time she arrives. She does not need to bring me anything or accomplish anything before she comes. I am not measuring how well she has behaved since I last saw her or wondering whether she has somehow earned my delight. I am simply delighted because she is Clara, and she is here.

Grandmotherhood has given me a different way of experiencing love. Parenthood held this same immense love, of course, but it also carried the beautiful demands of vocation: responsibility, formation, protection, discipline, and the daily work of raising another human being. Grandmotherhood has offered me a different vantage point. There is a freedom simply to be present, available, and completely enchanted by the wonderfully particular little person standing before me. Somewhere in loving her this way, God has begun teaching me something about being loved.

God’s Loving Gaze Through the Love We Give

I have spent much of my life trying to understand what it means to be loved by God; have you? We hear the words easily enough: God loves you. Receiving them is another matter entirely. We place boundaries around love when it moves toward us. Someone tells us something beautiful they see in us, and almost immediately we begin qualifying it. If they really knew this part of me... If they had seen me then... They mean this about me, certainly not that. Sometimes the boundaries become even stronger when the love belongs to God; yet, there is something curious here.

While we may struggle to receive love without qualification, many of us know what it is to give love that feels almost beyond our capacity to contain. Perhaps you know this through a child or grandchild, or even an animal who has somehow found its way into a room of your heart you did not know existed. You look at this beloved creation and think, I cannot possibly explain how much I love you. What if that experience is itself an invitation?

What if the way I delight in the one I love is only the faintest glimpse of the delight with which God looks upon me?

God’s Loving Gaze Is Larger Than Our Imagination

My love for Clara does not explain God’s love to me. It simply gives me somewhere to stand while I try to imagine it because my love has limits - I am human. My capacity to love, no matter how enormous it may sometimes feel, remains contained within my humanity. And yet I believe that even this capacity has its origin in the God whose image I bear.

So lately I have found myself wondering: If this is how deeply I can love within the limits of my humanity, what might love be within the limitless heart of God?

Could the loves we experience in this world be tiny apertures of grace, small openings through which we occasionally glimpse something too immense to comprehend? Could they also be invitations to question the limits we have placed upon God’s loving gaze?

Seeing My Unique Creation Through God’s Loving Gaze

There is no other Clara. I see pieces of her mother in her. I see pieces of her father. Yet somehow all of those pieces have been gathered into this entirely new creation with her own imagination, humor, creativity, tenderness, curiosity, and wonderfully particular way of being in the world. She is not a copy - she is herself.

And so are you.

This is something I return to again and again in Your Creation Theory: you are a particular expression of God’s creativity. Your story, your gifts, your desires, your way of encountering beauty, your temperament, even the ways you are still becoming have been gathered into a human life that has never existed in precisely this way before. We can spend so much of our lives trying to become someone more worthy of God’s delight that we miss the possibility that God already delights in the particular creation standing before Him.

God does not love some improved version of you waiting somewhere in the future. He loves the particular creation standing before Him now.

What might happen if you allowed yourself to remain there for a moment? Not explaining or improving yourself, and not looking away. Rather, allowing all of yourself to be seen.

God’s Loving Gaze Changes Discernment

In our last blog, we stood together at a threshold of grace and considered the possibility that awareness is not the destination. Relationship is the invitation. Could this be the next movement across that threshold?

This is something important to ponder, because the God I believe is looking at me shapes the way I listen to God.

If I imagine His gaze as perpetually disappointed or demanding, I may hear invitation as expectation. I may mistake conviction for condemnation. I may approach discernment anxiously, trying desperately to discover the “right” answer so that I do not disappoint Him. But relationship changes the way we listen.

When I begin to trust that I am desired by God, that He delights in the unique creation He has made, and that His gaze is fundamentally one of love, I become freer to listen. Discernment becomes less about getting God right and more about coming to know the One who loves me. Perhaps becoming a discerning person begins here too.

The more I come to know the One who loves me, the more readily I recognize His voice. And the more deeply I trust His gaze, the freer I become to respond.

An Embodied Pause Beneath God’s Loving Gaze

Before you open your journal, allow yourself to remember someone or something you love deeply.

Do not analyze the relationship. Bring your beloved to mind.

Notice what happens within your body as you do. Does something soften? Do you notice warmth, tenderness, a smile beginning to form, or nothing particular at all? There is no sensation you are supposed to have. Simply notice the love that moves outward from you.

Place one hand gently over your heart.

Take a slow breath in and pray: If this is how love feels within my human heart...

Exhale slowly: Lord, help me receive even a glimpse of Yours.

Remain there for a few breaths.

You do not need to imagine God’s face or manufacture a feeling of being loved. Only make yourself available to His loving gaze.

Journaling with God

When you are ready, allow whatever surfaced in the embodied pause to accompany you into these questions:

• Who or what have I been given the grace to love with a tenderness that sometimes feels larger than I can explain?

• When I imagine God looking at me, what do I instinctively believe I see in His gaze?

• What part of my unique creation might God be inviting me to see with new eyes?

  
  

A Closing Prayer

Loving God, the love within me came first from You. Teach me to receive what I so freely desire for those I love. Let me remain beneath Your loving gaze long enough to recognize the person You have always seen, and from that place of belovedness, teach me to listen. Amen.

From the garden within me, to the garden within you, where God awaits

Kimi