Signs That God Loves Us

"So coffee is my greatest vice," I said to the young intern in the emergency room where I had gone for sudden chest pains a few years ago.  "Coffee is not a vice;" he replied definitively, "it is a sign that God loves us!"

As I sat at the beachfront today savoring a now-rare cup of McDonald's coffee, I gazed at the scenery and reflected on his words.  What a great way to live, seeing all around us signs that God loves us.  Once we start, it's as if our eyes and hearts are opened again to how many signs exist.  All of us have places of refuge, of beauty, of peace -- a sign that God loves us.  A garden, a park, a forest of special trees and creatures -- signs that God loves us.  Waves on the sea, the sun that comes up without fail, the moon and stars at night.  People that love us and those we love, meaningful work, and good friends …. just go for a walk with eyes looking for signs that God loves us, and our hearts will sing in gratitude.

Humanity's purpose is to praise God -- to be the soul of creation, and to return thanks to Him Whose Beauty shines through the work of His hands.  Our destiny is to delight in creation as a gift and to give gratitude to the Giver.  Gregory of Nyssa put it this way:  The human voice was fashioned for one reason alone -- to be the threshold through which the sentiments of the heart, inspired by the Holy Spirit, might be translated clearly into the Word itself.  

We were created to praise God.  On this account, we are called to learn to bear the joy of what C.S. Lewis calls "the weight of glory."  We were born to praise and to sing a new song of praise, and  through praise, to enter into communion with God.

The church teaches us how we can increase our ability to deepen and widen our song of praise -- deepening our communion with God and widening it to include all of creation, including the Body of Christ around us. Theology is an attempt to understand the works of God and to catch the rhythm of the Holy Spirit in our praise and thanksgiving.  Once we understand how God has worked in past history, we learn to fit our own stories into the pattern of grace. And once we see Him acting in our lives, we understand ever more fully how He acts in human history.  Church is the place where our perception of the world is altered in order to help us see grace more clearly. Thus we become more sensitive to its presence and more responsive to its promptings in our lives (from The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times by Charles Matthews).

So many things help us to see the grace all around us -- the casual remark of a young intern, a hot cup of coffee with cream, the breeze across the sand, the stillness of a blue heron, the Body of Christ, the Church:  all signs that God loves us.