There are three great and pernicious  lies about God: 1) God Cannot… 2) God Will Not… and worst 3) God Does Not Care.  These lies are old as man. But they are stubborn, to the point that they resist all sound thought, reason and doctrine.

The only way to subvert the strength of these lies is to allow power of the love of Christ in to our hearts, and further, into our wills, lifting, loosening the glue that keeps the lies sticking to our hearts.  No, we truly cannot begin to know God until we are enraptured and enfolded in His loving care. I post two poems about parental care which I hope will provoke and stir up a sense of God’s love for you. God can, God may – and mostly because God cares.

 Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather
made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
….
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

-by Robert Hayden [partial]

To My Mother
I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it

already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.

-by Wendell Berry