Love Letters To God I
I sit in the seat of a bard, heart housing waves of music and expressions for singing and writing. It is early morning and my pen is at the ready, waiting for a rushing, mighty wind of inspiration. As I wait, I reckon my life from between childhood to adolescence. I take stock of the many childish things that I could not do. The many clandestine love letters that I never got to write, all of which are dripping to the end of my pen. I want to write a love letter to God. But what must I know to be equipped to write about love?
Let me start with my earthly father, my first introduction to love. A father is a daughter’s first love, a mother her first friend, and a sister, the one that comes after.
Tall, dark like midnight, and whimsical in the way that fathers ought to be, he shared all things that he had with us: pieces of meat, last on the plate after a meal was done; he shared gifts, and clothes, and stories, and presence, and absence, and love, with a little guilt. He said big things about his children: by his words, our personalities came to life, and he always let us know that we were the architects of our own fortunes and misfortunes. And when he had used up the years of his life, at the grand old age of forty eight, he left us for heaven, never to return. We were all left to live without him. I at sixteen, my sister at fourteen, my brother at nine, and my mother; left with no husband at forty six. He left us in his prime.
As I sit here poking the walls of my mind for words that ought to be uttered, I wonder at the love that his father gave him. Did my grandfather rub his forehead as he passed by just because? Did they take strolls together as he showed my father Pride of Barbados flowers and other pretty things that were also quite mundane? Did he start random conversations about some new thing he heard about and laugh in the halting way my father did when he got to the irony of the situation?
Perhaps he did. Perhaps he did not. But we must continue this journey, and we must go all the way back to Adam, our collective forefather, who bequeathed us with a fallen soul, a broken volition and an incomplete story. Eden was a place to be cared for and tended, somewhere to mark the union of God and man; the temple of God that all men dwelt. Then Adam, deceived by Eve, deceived by the devil, conducted himself as a god; he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; and this marked the end of his tenure as priest of Eden. He was now to become priest of the earth, which was already broken the moment he ate of the tree. A son of God had fallen and all the earth with him.
How ironic is it then, that God, The Father; in restoring us to sonship through God, His Son; did not transport us back to the garden to finish what Adam started? How ironic is it then, that in describing where He was taking us, he said and I quote,
John 14:2–4
‘In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know. ‘
To this end, an apostle proclaimed a saying,
Ephesians 2:6–7
‘and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus: that in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus. ‘
What words of love could I speak to a God who in restoring me did not take me back to a temple? What words of affirmation could I possibly utter to a king who elevated me from the dunghill of sin to the throneroom of Heaven Himself? What must I know to be equipped to write a love letter to God?
