Where Can The Love of God Be Found?

Let’s face it, friends, in spite of TV and movies and football and soccer and baseball and golf and fishing and hunting and all our other recreations and diversions…in spite of parties and dances and poker games and family reunions and even church socials…

…it is indeed a lonely and often frightening world we live in.

There’s air pollution and water pollution and cancer and bad car wrecks, broken marriages and life-wrecking divorce and heartbroken children with aching souls…

…there are teenage gangsters and drugs on the streets, corrupt politicians and greedy corporations, nagging sicknesses and cheap grocery store food on the shelves that doesn’t nourish us properly and may just make us ill…

…there are wildfires and floods and earthquakes and tornadoes and hurricanes and lightning strikes and…

And mostly – deep in our hearts – there’s just too much fear, the bad kind, and loneliness. Even if we have some good family and friends, sooner or later we come to grief and isolation in some form or another. Or we experience it insidiously every single day as we go about our business and look “normal” to everyone around us.

So we all secretly long for escape — to a safe paradise where beauty and love and deep soul-comforting intimacy fills us. We long for joy and bliss in a different sort of world that will never end. We want the elation of continual celebration and hugs and kisses and…no tears…

But that escape to a painless love paradise of beauty and togetherness and endless pleasure just doesn’t exist. Not yet, anyway. We’re stuck here in our “cold, cruel world” and we gotta just gut it out. Doesn’t matter whether we live in the big city or a college town or a small town or the country. We just gotta battle through the long slog of our lonely, quietly desperate lives.

Or…do we?

To soothe our anxious, lonely souls we take another drag on our cigarette, pour ourselves another drink, drown our minds in loud music and toke at midnight. We drive too fast and guiltily watch porn and even cheat on our spouses. We eat sugary junk food that might one day kill us. Or we throw in the towel and just suicidally inject.

Or we work like maniacs to get rich but never have enough money to truly satisfy.

It has been well researched and scientifically/psychologically documented. Just under the surface of all our activity and busyness and polite smiles, we are…lonely. And afraid. Even a Tom Hanks movie character said so, in a very serious sort of way.

For a season, especially when we’re young, we might convince ourselves otherwise. Sometimes, temporary fun or favorable circumstances deceive us.

But sooner or later, stark reality overtakes us.

Many years ago, a handsome, middle-aged and well-known minister in Abilene, Texas, preached a last sermon then went outside the auditorium and blew his brains out. His misery quotient had hit overload. No one knew exactly why or what could have helped.

Before that, my own mother had attempted suicide first by sleeping pills then by hanging then by car exhaust. I’ve spent decades since then trying to understand why.

Today, in 2017, in spite of iPhones and iPads and Facebook and Messenger, teen suicides are still numerous and tragic and devastating. And old folks wither away in nursing homes or at home alone, facing sure death by loneliness.

What’s missing with us? Why is so much so wrong — not just in our world but inside us? Why all the pain and self-destructive behavior? Were we really made to live this way?

And for the love of God, is there an answer?

Where, in point of fact, can the love of God be found? Or is that, after all, just a mindless expression with no correlation to our mutual sad reality?

I’m thinking that if the love of the Creator cannot indeed comfort us, way deep inside, ultimately we’re screwed. We are — hats off to you, Henry David Thoreau — doomed to live those lives of quiet desperation he referred to then go feed worms six feet under.

Radical question: Was the Biblical author called the Apostle Paul wonderfully brilliant and highly trained yet tragically misguided? When he wrote to the first century Christians in Rome and Ephesus about the love of God, was he just wistfully imagining things? Was he not inspired with real, lasting truth anymore than is a salamander or a drunk fool?

After all, if you actually can fill a dark and lonely human soul with the light of warm divine love, and that love can endure…then…that changes everything.

For all of us.

This is worth investigating.