Longing can be scary. Can you think back to an early memory of deeply hoping for something …. only to experience disappointment? Many of us learned early on to temper our desires.
We do it for self-preservation. We do it in the hopes of holiness. We do it because we’re afraid.
Incarnation is culmination of longing.
In the coming of Jesus, God threw caution to the wind. God poured all of the longing for the kind of intimate relationship shared between the persons of the Trinity with humanity into the coming of God as human. The depths and intensity of that longing are beyond our imagination.
And God did it knowing that Jesus would be rejected.
The love of God is so strong, so secure, so sufficient, in and of itself, that the knowledge that this love would be rejected didn’t stop God from pouring it out.
Our God is fierce. Our God is fearless. Our God pursues us that boldly, that outrageously.
Incarnation is the culmination of longing.
God is not ashamed to long for us that intensely and that intimately.
God is not diminished by our rejection.
What might change if we could see our longings as invitations to new experiences of fearlessness?
Beloved one, what if you are not diminished by another’s rejection?