Though God is an almighty lover

Though God is an almighty lover, he can find himself shut out, and he longs to find an open door of vulnerability in us.  It is extraordinarily hard for us to realize this, conditioned as we are by a secular ethic of success and a religious ideal of moral perfection which may owe little to the gospel.  God calls us, implants his life in the deepest centre of our being at baptism, and loves us into growth.  He does not propose to us some lofty, rigid ideal to which we must attain by our unaided human resources.  We are more sinful than we know, more deeply flawed than we can recognize by any human insight; but grace works in us in the deepest places of body and spirit.  We must live from our weakness, from the barren places of our need, because there is the spring of grace and the source of our strength, as Paul discovered: ‘When I am weak, then I am strong.’ When we can stand before God in the truth of our need, acknowledging our sinfulness and bankruptcy, then we can celebrate his mercy.  Then we are living by grace, and we can allow full scope to his joy.

– from Gateway to Hope by Maria Boulding (1929–2009)