The Tenderness of the Father
Chesed of Netzach Day 22 of 50 · Lovingkindness within Victory
effort rooted in grace
A crowd gathered on Mount Eremos, who believed in the return of the Living Christ. Five hundred faithful souls1 prayed together. The Risen Christ appeared to them.
This is the twenty-second saying of the Living Christ:
You have heard it said that God is the Lord who sits enthroned above all things, but I tell you, this is not the fullness of what Abba, my Father, is.
Consider the wind. You do not say, ‘The wind exists.’ You say, ‘The wind blows.’ Where it moves, there is life. When it stills, it is no more.
My Father is not a throne. Abba is what happens between the seed and the rain, between the father and the lost son the moment the son turns toward home. The love that goes out and the love that receives it are not two things. They are one motion, and that motion is God.
I am in the Father and the Father is in me. Not as the same stone, or as two stones in a stream, but as the water and the current, in the same river, each flowing with the current of the other.
You were made in this same river. This is the image of God within you. You did not come into this world to observe God from a distance, but to live God.
When you feed the hungry, you do not perform a service for God. You become the hand of God in that moment. This is what life is. Not a road that leads toward God at the end, but the flow itself, and you are meant to move within it.
I am the way. I am the motion. Follow me into the flow.
But there is an adversary, and his sole purpose is to stop the flow. The Accuser builds a wall and names it ‘Prudence.’ He dams the spring and calls it ‘Security.’ He fences the pasture and calls it ‘Law.’ Wherever love is withheld and forgiveness refused, there he has done his work. Sin is not a list of forbidden things.
Sin is the stopping of the flow.
Whoever has ears, let them hear.
Do not quench the Spirit, speaking words of love, yet demanding what is impossible from yourself or others. When endurance is demanded, while grace is promised but never fully given or received, life is hollowed out. This is not love, but a yoke of iron wrapped in silk.
Beware of weakening your will to persist, dissolving it into mere comfort in the name of loving kindness. Loving kindness is not an excuse to stop, but the strength to endure. Love sustains life.
When the roots of holy endurance are cut, the whole tree withers, and the fruit of life does not grow.
Let your persistence be clothed in mercy. When the oxen are weary, the righteous do not use the lash on them; but lead them to the shade. Let them rest and tend to the other needs of the field, returning to the plow once they have renewed their strength. If your endurance forgets love, only weakness grows.
Be like your Father, whose tenderness believes in us, not because we are hard workers, but because we are his children. He does not ask us to persist in order to earn a place in the kin-dom. He invites us to persist as the kin-dom, in the love and care we have for one another.
Our Father does not ask for striving or violence of spirit. He heals us at our roots, so that our labor no longer frightens us. Abba encourages us. Living in God moves like a river. Sometimes the flow is fast, at other times the river slows into calm waters. He is our companion, the flow between us and all things. In the rhythm of the tides, we find our rest. In the current we endure, in the sending and receiving.
Holy ambition is effort rooted in grace.
Hear the voice of Abba, “Keep going, you are loved.” His voice heals, and repairs endurance with love. The God who calls us forward is the same God who carries us when we fall.
The soul is mended when driven by grace and love. The world is restored because it finds its shape when we live in love rather than the fear that grinds us into dust.
Tenderness is the ground of all endurance.
