dailydatewithgod

It is so touching to watch others embrace.  It is as though you can see the warmth emanating from one person’s heart to the other.  I remember many years ago coming across a set of green copper sculptures at this gallery in Tubac, AZ.  They were both of a couple’s embrace. One was a man and a woman facing each other with her face at the nape of his neck .  The other was him standing behind her with his arms wrapped around the front of her body and her leaning back into his neck.  The tenderness of the emotion conveyed in the embrace was profound.  The owner of the gallery stated there was a woman who had come by a few days before and stood for hours looking at them and asked the owner if the sculptor was married.  Our embracing of one being to another has the capacity to be profound when it comes from the heart.  If it is forced or obligatory the experience is not one of actually being embraced.  It is much more than the physical motion. It is the intention and the feeling behind the action.  When we think of how God embraces us, do we conjure up ideas of something as intimate as the sculptures I described, a grandmother who has cupped the face of her grandson in her face, or the way a child holds on to the neck of the mom who has bent down to hug her hello after being away?  Perhaps it is none of these because while sometimes we like the idea of God with skin on, even we cannot measure the embracing God has placed within our hearts.  God’s embrace which lives within us needs no arms, faces, or bodies.  God made sure we would be able to connect with it when we open up to the idea of God embracing all of who we are in this moment.  The moment we take a breath.  If we are busy keeping part of ourselves out of God’s reach then God’s arms of love cannot profoundly embrace us.  We will be lacking in the experience of love’s embrace not because it does not exist for us but because we do not think we deserve such a profound experience.