Wednesday After Epiphany
In the prayerful reading of scripture called lectio divina, we are invited to pause when a word or phrase speaks to us. Pause and ponder. “Beloved.” We might easily move past this word, but it catches me almost every time. Beloved. This simple word is used six times in the short first letter of John. Six times, John addresses us, “beloved.” Pause and let that soak in. We are God’s beloved. Yes, you and I, each of us, and in a special way as the body of Christ here on earth, all of us together are the Beloved of God.
What might it look like to live fully in this truth, I wonder. To live in the truth that you and I, all of us together, are the Beloved of God. To trust our lives with that truth. To surrender to Love. Not once and for all, but in each moment, to remember that we are beloved, to let God love us. To let God love in and through us.
Surrender can be a loaded word. What would it look like to relax into God? Not to grasp, or to worry, but to rest in God, to live and move and have our being in God with others. I think this is what John means when he says, “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us.”
“To know and to believe.” Often, we apply these words only to intellectual understanding, to something that happens in our heads. Not all knowing or thinking happens in our brains, though. Research shows that our heart also thinks. Any dancer or athlete will also attest to muscle memory, a deep knowing in our bodies. John encourages us to let God dwell in us - not just in our heads, but in our entire bodies.
Yes, we are the beloved, and God dwells in us. Imagine a world in which we believed that, lived that, with the entirety of our bodies. Imagine your life if you allowed yourself to let go of fear and anxiety, to relax your grip and trust in God and the beloved community. Imagine our life together, living the beloved community.
There is a reason we call ourselves practicing Christians. This way of life, this surrender to Love, takes practice. Even the disciples on the boat in the storm were caught in fear. It’s ok that we fear. But can we pause and let God into that fear, and trust that we live in Love and Love lives in us? It takes a lifetime of practicing our faith, moment to moment, letting Love dwell in us, love us, and love through us. I think John knew this when he wrote this little letter, and that’s why he reminded us six times that we are the Beloved.
Beloved, let us live in Love and Love live in us.
—Kelly Adamson