Straining Gnats

It's an odd thing to be a human being in the spring.  We feel the pulses of growth, catch the invigorating whiff of life, and become giddy at the clear cornflower daytime sky or the deep navy of night.
In sunny moments we soak it in, and in stormy sessions we observe the grass and weeds lengthen almost visibly.
We are impacted, yet buffered by the boxes we live, work and travel within.  Artificially controlled brightness and temperature distance us from the vibrancy, but the underlying rhythm taps time to the pulse in our wrist and when we lay a finger across we are surprised by the insistence of it, the regularity, the truth.

God's love is like Spring, I think.  It comes with brilliant life-giving light, it douses with torrents of nourishing hydration, it anchors and envelops in growth.
I am in existence and will remain so because of Love.
Nothing more; nothing less.  I was made, redeemed and am being transformed (ever-so-slowly) by the Eternal God who is glorified when I trust His promises and heedlessly plummet into the depths of His great affection for me.

Thinking about the high bar in 1 John that charges me to imitate God's charity, I want to brush it aside as impossible and go on with the status quo.
Within relationships, it's just common sense to reciprocate with distance and parameters - with careful regard for my own precious personhood - frugally measuring out a proportionate degree of warmth and vulnerability.

Like God with me?

What if I don't observe propriety?  What if I eschew decorum?  What if I ignore the signals to keep my distance?  What if I am the first to love?

God is, as Francis Thompson says, the Hound of Heaven, who pursues me, even as I flee His Presence.

How can I claim to believe such an eclipsing statement as God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son...and yet maintain barriers based on peripheral distinctions?  How can I settle for divisions, whatever the social or theological distance?
As with the boxes that enclose our lives perhaps I have forgotten that shelters are for the purpose of safety from high winds, lightning and freezing cold -- not to regularly barricade me from the creation of which I am an element: important, but still only one part.

I wonder if  Aslan's great laugh and the Eldil who flashed with reflected light...or the inhabitants of Rivendell, resplendent in their nobility were intended by Lewis and Tolkien to catch our attention and turn us in wonder to worship the pulsing Glory that is able to make all things new.  
Worship -- and grow, battered image bearer though I be.

To love my enemies is dangerous.  
To bless those who curse me is imprudent. 
To keep no record of wrongs is not safe in the least.

"There remain faith, hope, love -- these three.  But the greatest of these is love."