Love Song Grace

Only as the gifts are attended does God’s choosing of us become so utterly passionate.

It’s a new voice, this endless stream of grace, one I never get over. This love song He is singing, it is the antithesis of life’s theme song, that refrain of rejection I know so well. That mental soundtrack of condemnation and criticism that I’ve let run on continuous replay, lyrics I learned from the grade-three boys huddled on the ice, exploding laughter when my skates slid east, west, and I fell south; from the trendy city girl moved to the country who snickered at my thrift store shirts; from the critical eye of every evaluator, judge, assessment, grade. That heavy beat of failure, a pounding bass of disappointment, it has pulsed through my days and I’ve mouthed the words, singing it to myself, memorizing the ugly lines by heart. They become the heart.

For years, I tried medication, blade, work, escape, all attempts to drown out that incessant, reverberating drum of self-rejection. All futility, acidic emptiness.

But here, I hear it well: The only thing to rip out the tape echoing self-rejection is the song of His serenade. One thousand gifts tuned me to the beat. It really is like C. S. Lewis argued — that the most fundamental thing is not how we think of God but rather what God thinks of us: “How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important.”^a Years of Christian discipleship, Bible study, churchgoing had been about me thinking about God; practicing eucharisteo was the very first I had really considered at length what God thought of me — this ridiculous and relentlessly pursuing love, so bold. Everywhere, everything, Love!

Giving thanks awakens me to a God giving Himself, God giving Himself to me—for me—a surrender of love.

The discipline of giving thanks, of unwrapping one thousand gifts, it unwraps God’s heart bare.

I choose you. Live!

He chooses His children to fully live! Fully live the fullest life — the astonished gratitude, the awed joy, the flying and the free.

I hear the beat of his heart, that song crystal clear: “ ‘I have loved you,’ says the Lord” (Malachi 1:2).

In a thousand ways He woos.

In a thousand ways I fall in love.

Isn’t falling in love always the fullest life?

Oh, Lord, if You sing love over me forever, could I not sing thanks to You just for today?