For part of my childhood, I didn’t love God. However, I spent many hours at St. Andrews Church in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, where my dad was organist-choirmaster (more about him here). Much of that time was in the historic sanctuary, built in 1857, as pictured below. On Sundays, I typically sat with my mom in the choir loft. Directly behind and facing us were large plaques of the Ten Commandments and the creeds. The plaques extend almost as high as the soaring ceiling. I must have read them countless times before I realized I had a problem with #1: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind.”
I believed in and respected God, but I didn’t love God. Yet I knew that loving God was foundational to keeping ALL God’s commands, including loving my neighbors; I heard this truth repeated every Sunday in Rite I for Holy Communion in the Book of Common Prayer.
My younger self reflected on this dilemma. Somehow I realized that I wouldn’t be able to love God without his help, so I decided to pray for God to help me love him. I did that for a couple of years, which seems like a long time for anyone, especially a child, to pray for something. As an adult, I get impatient after a couple of weeks of unanswered prayer!
Perhaps I benefited then from a child’s trust and skewed sense of time. I think it’s fair to say I wasn’t preoccupied with when God would respond to me or how my prayer would be answered; I was satisfied merely to fulfill my own obligation to God as I was called, in prayer, without worrying about what he’d do. I prayed as if into the void, without an answer, but I believed God heard me. And that was enough.
To be succinct: my child’s mind didn’t overthink things the way I do now.
One afternoon a couple of years later, I was sitting in the pews and singing a hymn when I unexpectedly experienced the wildest sensation. Somehow I could feel God inside of me, loving me. I could sense his person, his mind. My immediate, involuntary response to his love was my love. That’s how God answered my prayer, how he enabled me to love him and fulfill the first commandment. I’m reminded of 1 John 4:19: “We love him [God] because he first loved us.”
Of course, I did my part. My diligent, years-long prayer to love God, although done without any feeling of love on my end, was still an act of love. But God fanned the quivering flame of love inside of me by giving me access to him and to his love. He completed the good work he started in me (Ph. 1:6).
Sometimes when I come to God in prayer, I worry I might be imagining God’s feelings or his words. I tend to overthink. But this experience I had with God as a little girl was not a fanciful conjuring. My crazy, sudden, inexplicable and intense awareness of God’s consciousness was not an experience I would have been able to imagine then, and I didn’t overanalyze it; I received it in wonder and joy.
A few years ago I was reading a child’s version of the Gospels to my three-year-old daughter. Eventually, we came to the story where a lawyer approaches Jesus in the temple:
“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law? Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment, and the second is like it. On these two commandments hang all the law and the Prophets.’ ” (Matt. 22:36-40)
Afterward my daughter turned to me with concern and said, “I don’t love God.”
I got goosebumps.
Don’t worry, I said. Now that you realize you don’t love God, you can ask him to help you love him.
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