Responding to God’s Healing Love

In my previous post I suggested B.R.E.A.T.H. as a trauma-informed discipleship and church planting framework. Each movement is less a step we take and more an ever-widening circle of growing in love with God and neighbor.

The next movement in the discipleship journey is to respond to God’s unconditional love. This is the turn upward. Even as we turn inward to discover our true beloved identity, there, we find God finding us at the core of our being. Responding is a lifelong journey of growing in our union with Jesus, lived out one day at a time.

Respond: responding to God’s graceful initiation of healing love, by cultivating habits that lead to growth in love for God with heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Every relationship requires both parties to be mutually committed to one another. Just like a good marriage, a relationship requires time and attentiveness to our significant other. Good relationships don’t just happen, they take dedication and effort. Two people committed to each other don’t just make the decision to love each other once. It’s an everyday decision. We express that decision in a multitude of little habits regularly.

We listen to one another. We communicate. We articulate our needs and desires. We support one another. We prepare each other’s meals. We clean the house. We do laundry. We wash dishes. We leave each other love notes. The list goes on ad infinitum.

Consider the relationship between parent and child. A parent expresses their love to a child in millions of ways over the course of their development. We attend to needs. We listen. We celebrate. We change diapers. We feed and nurture. We clothe and shelter. We pack lunches. We get them off to school and extracurricular gatherings.  

Every now and then a child responds with appreciation (less frequently as they become teenagers). Frequently we are elated as we see them develop in an exciting new way. We appreciate their ongoing development as a person. We receive more from our children than we ever give. They themselves are a gift to our life.

The key to these relationships is attentiveness and presence.

In our relationship with God, God is the initiator. We can only love because “he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). God is the primary actor in the relationship. Our love is a response.

Just like any other relationship, our relationship with God is an ongoing commitment and journey. Just like in any other relationship, it requires sacrifice. Unlike any other relationship, this self-giving is a pathway to eternal life. And as in any healthy relationship, we show our love to God in a multitude of little holy habits.

Some say the Bible feels like a big, overwhelming rule book. There are approximately 613 Levitical restrictions in the Old Testament. Is our relationship with God a series of do’s and don’ts? Does God stop loving us when we mess up?

Fortunately, Jesus, the fulfillment of Scripture, brought the two main ideas of the entire Bible into a simple (but not easy!) “great commandment.” It’s the Old Testament Shema, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5) and the commandment to “love your neighbor as you love yourself (Leviticus 19:9-18). Jesus says “all the law and prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:40). Meaning all those graceful boundaries are summarized and fulfilled in this law of love.     

The first half of the great commandment is our focus in the “respond,” space of the B.R.E.A.T.H. discipleship pathway, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength (Mark 12:30-31).

God wants us to be restored, healthy, and whole. We can only truly be fully alive and whole through our relationship with God. The word the Bible uses to talk about this is “salvation.” Think back to the idea of original trauma and inbeing sin as a kind of virus we all carry.

Jesus’s teaching on the “great commandment” gives us a holistic framework to understand salvation and health, which are inextricably linked. This is not just about what happens to us when we die. This is a gift that God offers us that has implications for our lives right now, today. A diminished understanding of salvation has often been emphasized in the Western church, whereas the biblical vision of shalom (a world at peace) is much more expansive than saving souls for relocation to heaven when we die.

It's essential to recognize that every dimension of our humanity, heart, soul, mind, strength, was created for one purpose… love. Through our relationship with God, we are on an ongoing journey “growing in love.”

For a person to be truly healthy, it requires an integration of all these dimensions of our humanity. To treat these parts as if they were totally separate is a false dichotomy. The Scriptures show us that there is a unified oneness to those different spheres of our being. A healthy soul is conducive to a healthy mind, a healthy mind is predicated upon a healthy body, and so on. Growing healthy in the Biblical sense is about growing in love and being good stewards of each of those dimensions.

To speak of these dimensions, we might find it helpful to understand the human condition as one primarily in a state of recovery. Every human being is in recovery from the original trauma, therefore, growth always begins from the starting point of our woundedness. No one loves God and neighbor perfectly all the time. We are all in a lifelong growth process in this way.

Healing is a lifelong journey of restorative grace. God is restoring the beloved masterpiece that is you, slowly over the course of your life. Yet, our life is a lived response to that grace, which requires discipline and continuous intentional effort in the right direction. We have a part to play.

The discipleship journey is about cultivating small holy habits that create big change over time. Historically, some have called these holy habits, the “means of grace” which are the ordinary channels of God’s love into our lives. They are also channels through which we return love back to God.

In B.R.E.A.T.H. I explore these dimensions more deeply and give a fresh reimagination of what has been historically called the “means of grace,” or more specifically “works of piety” and “works of justice.”