The assignment was simple yet seemingly impossible to me: draw an aspect of God’s character. (It might have felt easier if I could draw!) It was the first night of a course called Spirituality and the Arts, and we had ten minutes to complete the exercise, so I picked up my pencil and began sketching. What I attempted to draw was a small, faded brown, 1989 Subaru with a female stick figure sliding down its hood. Large, strong, sinewy arms encircled the whole scene.
Earlier that day, during a pleasant morning jog on a nature trail that wound through a Seattle office park, I had been struck by that same brown Subaru. A truck-driver had waved me across the crosswalk, but neither he nor I saw the little vehicle moving in the lane next to him; nor could its driver see me. When I finally did see the car approaching, too late, watching in horror, even as my left side was falling on the hood, I remember two things – first, the sentence that played in slow motion through my mind, “So this is how I’m going to die.” And then, sitting on my rear, cross-legged, just as I had landed on the asphalt, repeating to myself over and over, “I’m not dead. I’m not dead.”
What I wanted to convey that night in class was the sovereign, ever-present, shielding, powerful love of God I now knew in a brand new way. The Bible asserts that love cannot be defined without God: “God is love” (1 John 4:8b). Love is a fixed reality about the nature of God – and God is a fixed reality about the nature of love. The narrative of Scripture characterizes God’s love as, among other things, steadfast, covenantal, merciful, gracious, sacrificial and transformational. Love is God’s prodigally generous, contra-conditional, eternal gift. And it is in this love alone that we as humans know love.
