All You Need...

by Susan Stewart

I spend a lot of time in my car just listening... Listening to music, to talk shows on the radio, sometimes simply for that still small voice...

Lately I've been listening to Dallas Willard's book, "Divine Conspiracy". It's blowing me away, as my poor friends are becoming aware of. The man is a self-confessed "thinker" - that's the way God wired him - to love thinking things through and then writing about them. And God is using those things to speak in a still small way - deep and healing things - in the quiet most remote recesses of my heart.

This week it was some of his thoughts about love that hit home. (I guess that's appropriate - this being so close to Valentine's Day.) What he said that struck me is that the only remedy for us messed up ego-centric human beings - the only way to undo the self referential inward spiral bent toward complete and utter self-centredness - is to be adequately loved. To be loved. It's the cry of our hearts. It's all we really want - or need. Just to be loved. To be understood, accepted, loved.

I know what my heart is like. How much it still longs for wholeness - to have the freedom to just "be". To be loved fully and to fully love. But things get so complicated!

"The only way for us to be healed, is to be adequately loved".

Oh, my goodness hearing those words struck a chord and as I write them, they strike a chord again! The Bible says God is love. And Jesus was the exact representation of the Father's love on earth. How much love there is available to me! Yet at the same time how resistant I am to it - so quick to slip into religiously trying to "earn", when there's no way I possibly could. Or if I'm not earning, trying to fill that need in other ways... turning away from the Living Water and drinking from broken cisterns and polluted wells.

What more could Jesus do to show me that I am perfectly loved than to lay down his life the way he did? What more?

There is no more. Such love was poured out over those hours of suffering and death as to last an eternity, to be the great "remedy of the ages". To reach through the centuries, across the years, to still, these thousands of years later, reach your heart and mine. To bring healing to our aching hearts, wholeness to our lives.

Like the song that dates back to my teenage years... "All you need is Love..."

Indeed. That's all we need. Love personified. Love.