outWORD by Matte Downey

Image from tes.com Take a rope and hold one end in your hands. Imagine that God holds the other end. What does your relationship and communication with God look like? Are you the one constantly pulling on the rope, trying to get God's attention, hoping that he will give you what you need, trying to drag him closer to you and your situation? Or does it feel like the Almighty One is doing most of the pulling, making demands on you, insisting that you move, yanking you out of your comfort zone all the time? Or maybe somewhere in the craziness of life you feel like you have accidentally dropped your end of the rope and now you can't find it. The connection seems lost. Henri Nouwen believes that loving (or rightly relating to) God involves moving from illusion to prayer. And what is the illusion? Or more accurately, what are our illusions (plural)? We might think that we are in control, that it is our story we are telling, our drama we are living. Or that it is up to us to mak

Image from veteranstoday.com I have been teaching a mini-series in our faith community dealing with the three interconnected loves found in the answer to the question, "Which is the most important commandment?" Jesus' reply is this: "You should love the Eternal, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second great commandment is this: Love others in the same way as you love yourself. There are no commandments more important than these" (Mark 12:30-31, The Voice). You can find a summary of my first talk on loving yourself  here . Now I turn my attention to what it means to rightly relate to our neighbour, or to the other. It is imperative to remember that we cannot neatly dissect these three relationships; how we relate to ourselves is directly related to how we perceive God relates to us and likewise, how we relate to others is directly related to how we believe God views the other. If any one