Sabbath Devotional :: You Are My Beloved

I returned home late tonight (Saturday) after spending the past week in Seattle helping my younger sister who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer and had a bi-lateral mastectomy on Wednesday. (The surgery went well, and the good news is that it looks like the cancer hadn’t spread to the lymph nodes.) My feelings have been very tender as I’ve contemplated the fragility of life, the preciousness of our relationships, and God’s astonishing love for us. As I thought about what to share with you for this week’s Sabbath Devotional, this passage from Henri J.M. Nouwen’s book “Life of the Beloved” came to mind. Nouwen writes of the need for us to listen carefully to that voice which says, “You are my Beloved.” He then writes:

“Listening to that voice with great inner attentiveness, I hear at my center words that say: ‘I have called you by name, from the very beginning. You are mine and I am yours. You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests. I have molded you in the depths of the earth and knitted you together in your mother’s womb. I have carved you in the palms of my hands and hidden you in the shadow of my embrace. I look at you with infinite tenderness and care for you with a care more intimate than that of a mother for her child. I have counted every hair on your head and guided you at every step. Wherever you go, I go with you, and wherever you rest, I keep watch. I will give you food that will satisfy all your hunger and drink that will quench all your thirst. I will not hide my face from you. You know me as your own and I know you as my own. You belong to me. Wherever you are I will be. Nothing will ever separate us.'”

Wow, right? (Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to identifying all the various scriptures that are paraphrased into this one gorgeous passage.)

Sisters, God loves you. God loves you with a depth and a purity and a perfectness that we humans struggle to comprehend. As Paul writes so movingly to the Romans: “For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God” (Romans 8:37-39).

This love is the power that will bind up all wounds and heal this broken world. May we open ourselves up to receive this love and then may we act as conduits, allowing it to flow to us and through us to envelop all those within our sphere.