Smile! God Loves You!
I've seen two of these bumper stickers in the past week, and each
time I've wondered at what this really means. Yeah, I'm probably making
this short and simple phrase unnecessarily complicated...At first I thought that these were cool stickers to see. I mean, yeah, God does love you, and if anything should make you smile, this should be it! But then I got to thinking what, precisely, it means and what is entailed when God loves me.
And I immediately remembered all the times of pain that I've been through, and the trying times I'm going through right now. Do they give me good reason to smile? Hardly. But when it comes down to it...yeah, they should. God's love, and all love, carries in itself the intrinsic objective to bring the loved one towards a better end...to make them more whole, more lovable, more perfect. In the end I wholly agree with this exhortation to smile at the idea and glorious thought that God loves you...but I think it takes someone who has been through great sorrow and heart rending to truly understand and fully experience this impulse of muscles around our lips.
It's quite a coincidence, but I read something C.S. Lewis had to say on this exact matter, and well, he puts it a whole lot better than I ever could:
We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the 'intolerable compliment.' Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life -- the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child -- he will take endless trouble -- and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and recommenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumbnail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less...
When we fall in love with a woman, do we cease to care whether she is clean or dirty, fair or foul? Do we not rather then first begin to care? Does any woman regard it as a sign of love in a man that he neither knows nor cares how she is looking? Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive than hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved; his 'feeling is more soft and sensible than are the tender horns of cockled snails.' Of all powers he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all...
You asked for a loving God: you have one...How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes.
- C.S. Lewis
(emphasis added)
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