Continued Blessings and Unconditional Love

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God. —Ephesians 2:8, NRSV

Last weekend, I served as the officiant for a wedding. I didn’t know the couple before they reached out needing a minister. They were a same-sex couple whose families had not been entirely supportive of their relationship. One of them told me that her family would not be attending the ceremony because her spiritual beliefs about her sexuality did not align with theirs.

That lack of support hurts. “We’ve endured many hardships, difficult confrontations, and intense situations with those not quite ready to understand our relationship,” they told me, “but we’ve also grown tremendously, both individually and as a partnership, throughout our three-plus years together.”

When I asked them what they would like me to share at their wedding, the couple said that they would like “a message resembling God watching over us as we begin this next chapter of our lives, supporting one another, working as one, and for continued blessings and unconditional love.” Reading between the lines of that request, I thought about how deeply the pain of unsupportive family affects our faith, our spirituality, and our concept of God’s relationship with us.

When we’re young, our elders inform that concept; like Louise Denham did for me: a woman two generations my senior and unrelated to me by blood who whispered to me affectionately when I sat next to her in church once, “I’m so honored to be your grandmother in Christ.” In our most formative years, our parents might especially bear the face of God, towering over us as our shepherds, caring for us in their imperfect ways, all the while giving us glimpses of what love looks like.

So, when the family we belong to and aspire to be like, and the elders we look up to and even revere withhold support from us, it stunts our spiritual growth. When grace, mercy, and love are kept from us by the ones who inform our concept of the divine, it hurts. And that pain burrows so deep as we grow that, in our adult life, we expend our energy chasing after what was withheld from us in our youth. Whether consciously or not, we work ourselves to death in pursuit of grace withheld, mercy denied, love kept from our yearning soul.

That is what kept flashing in my mind when the couple mentioned the hardships they had been through: how support held back by the God-figures in our lives results in God’s love being understood as partial. This instills in us the falsehood that God’s love is something we earn; that if we work hard enough, it will finally be granted to us. Worse yet, that internalized deception makes us believe that there are those in this world who are unworthy of that love; and that those people’s failure to obtain that worthiness in God’s eyes is on them. And the rift between “us” and “them” widens.

You see how this misguided belief is detrimental to our relationship with God as well as to one another? You see how withholding support puts a stumbling block on what Jesus teaches us is the greatest command: to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves?

So, at the wedding, I tried to say a healing word to what I’d read between the lines of the couple’s hardships. I told them and the congregation and myself that God’s grace, mercy, and love are freely given, and that we don’t have to work to prove our worthiness of receiving those gifts. Burning ourselves out trying to earn the support of our loved ones should never be confused with religious labor that might win God’s approval of us. The divine parent of all calls you Beloved, and stops at nothing to keep you within the fold of Their affection. We simply need to accept that freely given worthiness, let it flood our lives to the point of overflowing, and support one another out of that freely given abundance.

The couple wanted a message that affirmed them working together for continued blessings and unconditional love. Continued blessing and unconditional love. Embracing the latter assures the former. Being open to God’s offering of grace, mercy, and love paves the way for immeasurable blessings both in our lives and through our lives. This is not our own doing. It is the gift of God; God, who withholds no amount of everlasting love from you, and who does so in order that we would do the same for one another. By this we will all be continually blessed.