DOES GOD REALLY LOVE ME?

When bad things happen to us – tragedies, unexpected deaths of a loved one, sudden physical ailments or disabilities – we sometimes wonder if God really does love us because what has happened seems to be so undeserved. Yes, we are sinners. But who isn’t? Yes, even though some of our sins may be terrible are they so terrible that what has happened is compensatory punishment from God?

We wonder. We ask. We wrestle with the question about God’s unconditional love and forgiveness and we worry. Oh, do we worry! Our faith is tested as our patience is tried and our questions only increase the longer the pain and the suffering endure. So we ask, even demand, “Do you really love me God?” The longer we struggle, the more we worry and the closer we come to asking ourselves not only “Does God really love me?” but even more we begin to ask ourselves, “Is there really a god at all?”

One of my spiritual mentors, Father Ron Rolheiser who I often cite, recently wrote this when he was speaking about anxiety: “Some years ago, I went on a weeklong retreat directed by Fr. Robert Michel.... He began the retreat with these words: ‘I want to make this a very simple retreat for you. I want to teach you how to pray in a particular way. I want to teach you how to pray so that in your prayer…you will open yourself so that in your deepest self you will hear God say to you: “I love you!” Because before you hear this inside you, nothing will be enough for you…. Only after you have heard these words will you finally be free of your anxiety.’”

Nothing makes our love for another more worrisome than wondering if the one we love loves us in return or loves us as equally. Most of the time we have no doubt that our love for another is being returned. But if or when those doubts begin to arise, we know that our relationship is in trouble. We worry. We become anxious. We wonder if we did something, said something, to put that loving relationship in jeopardy, perhaps even putting it on the road to wrack and ruin.

While that is true in our human relationships, it just as true in our relationship with God even though the one we deem responsible for this feeling of love being lost is ourselves. When we begin to wonder whether or not God really loves us, we also wonder what we must have done to cause God to love us less or at all and then punish us in the process. To deny that we sometimes feel that way or assert that such questions never cross our mind is to avoid the truth. In humanity’s relationship with the divinity, humans always remain human.

As Father Michel said, we have to hear God say to us “I love you” if we want to cease being anxious about life itself and especially about our relationship to God and, thus, God’s total and unconditional love for us. That does not mean that life will now no longer be free of difficulies, that all will be well, that we will no longer suffer pain or hardship, that tragedies won’t happen. That only comes in death. In the meantime, however, it does mean that knowing and believing that God truly loves us is one less thing we have to worry about.