Our Joyful God

This evening, after my last class, one of our professors came and told me and several of my friends that our 8 am class was cancelled for tomorrow. As soon as he was around the corner we broke into a quiet but crazy dance.

Tonight I sat in my living room with four teenage girls and giggled.

It is so easy to look at our world and see it whirl-pooling down the drain. So easy to get overwhelmed by the hurt and brokenness. What is to love here? Surely the God who created, loves, and died for such a place must be miserable.

Here are some excerpts from a book I'm reading by Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy:

"...God leads a very interesting life, and...is full of joy. Undoubtedly he is the most joyous being in the universe. The abundance of his love and generosity is inseparable from his infinite joy. All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness. He sees it, experiences it, knows it from every possible point of view, this and billions of other scenes like and unlike it, in this and billions of other worlds. Great tidal waves of joy must constantly wash through his being.

So we must understand that God does not 'love' us without liking us--through gritted teeth--as 'Christian' love is sometimes thought to do. Rather, out of the eternal freshness of his perpetually self-renewed being, the heavenly Father cherishes the earth and each human being upon it. The fondness, the endearment, the unstintingly affectionate regard of God toward his creatures is the natural outflow of what he is to the core--which we vainly try to capture with our tired but indispensable old word love."

I don't know. These words resound with me...because I've felt it, haven't you? For brief moments? The frailness. The potential. The beauty. And my heart, for just one moment, understands what it is to be "very good."