DOES GOD REALLY LOVE ME?

My parents raised five children. I am the oldest and, while she was still alive, I was my Mom’s favorite. I know this to be true and so do my siblings. We were at my sister’s home for some gathering with four conversations going on at once: typical when Italians gather. All of a sudden and seemingly for no reason at all, my Mom got up from here chair, walked across the room to where I was sitting and announced to the gathered throng, “I want you all to know that Billy is my favorite.”

Immediately my brother Fran asked, “Mom, what about me?” And she said, “I love all of you equally.” That ended the discussion and I did not dare add to it. Why Mom even brought up the subject of favorites’ I have no idea. I did not ask back then and never did afterward. I suspect I was her favorite because I was her firstborn. The truth is that she had five favorites. The further truth us that each of us over the years has done something that put us in her disfavor as well, human beings that we are.

I think about Mom’s equal love for the five of us and know it to be true. Just because I may have been her favorite, she did not love me more than she did any one of my siblings nor did she ever love them less than she loved me. I got that. However, when I move on to think about God’s and God’s love for me and God’s love for the other six billion or so people who inhabit this planet, it becomes almost unimaginable how God could love each one of us equally. Loving five people equally is difficult enough given our individualities. Try six billion!

Gold’s love is universal. God loves everyone, no exceptions, and God loves everyone equally. We believe that and, yet, when we think about that truth, we find it almost incomprehensible and wonder if it is indeed true especially when we ask why some people are so blessed while others seem, well, so cursed. God has to be playing favorites, does not God? If God loves everyone equally, why is there so much disparity when it comes to doling out the benefits of such love? Should we not all be equal in the reception of God’s gifts if we are all equal in God’s love for us? Mom never gave me better gifts than she gave my siblings. She could have if she wanted to but never did. Could we not say the same for God? Should we not?

Thus we can ask the question: “Does God really love me or am I just one of the lucky ones?” It’s a fair question. The truth is, however, that for many Gild seems to be quite indifferent, like the God of the Deists who claim God created us and then left us on our own. Thus, if we are blessed, well and good. If not, too bad. God really doesn’t care, so they assert.

That is an easy and logical conclusion to draw and many have over the millennia, and still do. It is true, as Father Ron Rolheiser has written, that God’s love is so universal that it is perceived as indifference. The facts may say that is true. Our faith says that it is not. We believe God loves each of us equally, totally, eternally. We do not understand how or even why. We have more questions than answers but that does not stop us from believing that God really does love us.