If God is LOVE. . .

A couple of years ago, I started back to school.  I had never attended college and so I had to take all of the General Education courses to start with.  I managed to CLEP English 1101 (Communication Skills 1), but I still had to take the second part.  This turned out to be one of the best things to happen in my adult life.

One of the things that I dreaded most was all of the "nonsense" about poetry reading and such.  Most of the poetry that I had seen was (in my opinion) ranting and drivel.  I liked the stuff that had a compelling rhythm and that rhymed.  Edgar Allen Poe's poems as well as those of Louis Carrol and (yes!) Dr. Seuss.  If it didn't rhyme and have rhythm, I thought it was _______.   So of course I got to class on the first day and the teacher, Ms. M., said, "We're going to start with poetry, because that's what freaks everyone out."  She then asked what our opinions were. . .  so I told her mine.  To her credit, she didn't let it stop her.  It wasn't the first time she'd heard that someone didn't like poetry.  :)

So she split the class up and gave each group a poem to discuss, telling us to look for certain things to see what we see in the poems.  I took one look at the poem she gave us ( I can't remember what it was) and thought, "Great, this is stupid."  But, I had paid to take the class, and I had taken off from work to come to it, so I was going to at least give it a shot.

I looked around at my group and asked if any of them had ANY idea what the teacher was looking for.  They were as clueless as I was.

So, naturally, Ms. M. came to us first.
"What does this group see in their poem?"  For some reason my group looked at me. So I figured it was better to say something than to sit there looking dumb.  So I looked down at the poem and said the first thing I noticed, something about a pattern of repetition.  To my surprise, Ms. M. said "Yes! what do you think that could mean?"

I was dumbfounded. My bluff was called, so I ran with it.  I looked again at the poem and said the first thing that seemed to fit.
"Right!" she said. "Great! What else did you see?"
I said a couple more things about color and numbers with the same results and she moved on.  The guy in front of me looked back at me and said, "You. Are a beast."  (I'm still not sure if being a Poetry Beast is something I should be proud of, but I have to admit . . . as silly as it may seem, I'm STILL pretty flattered by that one.)
I denied it, of course, telling him that I just made all of that stuff up.  The thing is, I kept doing it.  Before long I realized that I was intuitively picking out important details in not only poetry, but also short stories and other prose.  And then I began to understand how I was seeing what I was seeing.  It came easier and easier, and I began to show others how to do it as well.

It changed the way that I read books or watched movies.  I began to like (and even love) some poems that I used to think were garbage.  The most important change though, came when I started realizing that what I was seeing was legitimate and consistently on target.  I realized that one really could read something and find things that were hidden by the author for a purpose, and sometimes things that the author didn't even realize that they had done.  I decided that if I had this ability, it had to be a gift from God (like a talent for music or art etc.).  And, if that was the case, it must be useful for something other than getting A's in English. Then, I heard someone say the old expression: "You can wring blood out of the pages of the Old Testament."  This was followed by some discussion about the Old Testament Wrathful God vs. the New Testament Loving God.

Now, the Bible says that God is the same yesterday, today and forever.(Hebrews 13:8)  It also says that God is love. (1 John 4:8)
So.  If that is true, then you SHOULD be able to go through all of those "bloody" stories and see a loving God.

You Can.  I have been doing Sunday School lessons for the past few years based solely on the Loving nature of God as seen in the Old Testament.  It is blatant in the story of the fall, judgement, and expulsion of man from the garden, and it is just as plain in His dealings with Cain, the first murderer.

If you believe that God is who He says He is, and if you believe that the Bible is true, then you owe it to yourself to read the Old Testament looking for examples of God's love in every story.  It will change your world.

Ms. M. was only trying to teach us how to get more out of literature.  God used her to show me how to get more out of life: a  relationship with my God that is day-to-day, personal, and REAL.