"I love you anyway."

Disclaimer: We love the Green Book. :)

This week's blog post is taken verbatim from one of the Readings for Reflection selections from Week 45, whose theme is "No Condemnation" (only 9 more weeks until Advent, people)!

Anyway, we loved it...especially its beautiful description of the way a loving, perfect God must sometimes see his unloving, imperfect creation:

"Recently I was in a doctor's office...when a young mother with long brown hair and a gentle face entered, pushing in a wheelchair a child three or four years old. The child obviously was disabled: her hands unable to grasp anything, her arms and legs flailing helplessly, her eyes unable to hold focus. Her voice could not make syllables but only squeals or little wails. The mother positioned the child's chair so that they were face-to-face.

"She began softly singing and doing the hand motions to the 'Itsy Bitsy Spider' directly in front of the child's face, to attract her attention. She repeated it over and over, sometimes catching the child's hand and kissing it, stroking her hair; she looked into the child's eyes and whispered, with enormous tenderness, 'I love you.'

"When God's love touches us in our neediness, the sorrow and suffering inherent in the human condition, we name it mercy. Mercy is perhaps the loveliest of all God's qualities. This is the love that reaches into dark space of our flailing and our failing, our losing and our dying. Mercy enters that space, picks us up and holds us tenderly until we are healed.

"Little by little, this love draws our groping hands and wasted energies to purposeful service; it looks directly into our uncomprehending eyes, hears our futile wail, and says, 'No matter, I love you anyway. Come on...' And so mercy brings us to ever-new life."

-From "Living in the Mercy," by Elaine M. Prevallet