"To allow yourself to be God's beloved is to be God's beloved. To allow yourself to be chosen is to be chosen. To allow yourself to be blessed is to be blessed. It is so hard to accept being accepted, especially from God. It takes a certain kind of humility to surrender to it, and even more to persist in believing it. Any used persons know this to be true: God chooses and then uses whom God chooses, and their usability comes from their willingness to allow themselves to be chosen in the first place. What a paradox!
"God's love is constant and irrevocable; our part is to be open to it and let it transform us. There is absolutely nothing we can do to make God love us more than God already does; and there is absolutely nothing we can do to make God love us less. We are stuck with it! The only difference is between those who allow that and those who don't, but they both are equally and objectively the beloved. One just enjoys it and draws ever-new life from that realization.
"Even though it's been the story of my whole life, I don't fully believe it yet myself, because it still seems too much, too good, beyond my wildest hopes, maybe whistling in the dark, maybe wishful thinking, maybe "cheap grace," maybe my faulty theology. But then I read the accounts of the scriptural saints, and I meet saints in jails and hospitals, and their very lives tell me this is true. They are always sinners in recovery, and they know that God does not love them because they are good, but God loves them because God is good."
-Richard Rohr, Hidden Things
