“I Don’t Feel Like God Loves Me”

We only had twenty minutes for bible study at the jail recently. A code had been called (usually an altercation or medical emergency) which means nobody moves until it’s cleared up. So, the guys were forty minutes late arriving. They were restless, a little annoyed, distracted. What to do in twenty minutes?

I decided to scrap the official plan. We read Ephesians 3:18-19:

I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

I followed this up by asking one simple question: “Do you find it hard or easy to believe that God loves you?” The question hung in the air for a few minutes. It was a large group and group dynamics in jail can be unpredictable (to put it mildly). And that’s a fairly personal question. Not the kind of thing you necessarily want to dive into in a room full of relative strangers. I began to wonder what I was going to do with the other eighteen minutes.

A young man to my immediate left broke the silence. He was skinny, soft-spoken, shy. It was his first time in chapel. He spoke with an accent (the name on the sign-up sheet led me to believe perhaps of some West-African extraction?). When I searched his name later, I discovered that he was younger than my kids. Which is always a very sobering thing to discover. “I find it hard to believe this,” he said. He held up the bible in his lap. “I read it in this book, but it’s just words on a page. How do I know they are true? I don’t feel like God loves me.” There were a lot of nods around the circle.

I don’t know much about the guys I work with each week. I only get bits and fragments of their stories. And because I work with the remand units, the turnover rates are quite high. Guys are always coming and going. Sometimes I only see them a handful of times. But I know enough to know that very few of these guys grew up knowing much of love. Abuse, dysfunction of all kinds, instability, neglect, addiction, poverty, revolving doors of adults? Yes, they know of all these things. Love? Not so much.

“God loves you” sounds different to different ears. Those of us fortunate enough to grow up being well-loved have less trouble transposing this love into the spiritual realm. It makes sense to us that love should be the bedrock reality of the cosmos. Or, at the very least, it’s more plausible. Those whose primary experience with love has been its absence? Those who have spent years chasing after it down all kinds of destructive dead ends? Well, that’s a different story. “God loves me? Yeah, if you say so, preacher.”

The danger in asking a question like “Do you find it hard or easy to believe that God loves you?” is that you should probably have something to say if the answer is the former and not the latter. I rummaged around in my theological cupboards for a few seconds, but everything I found there seemed partial or inadequate. And the clock was ticking.

I decided to speak more personally. “I think it’s more than just words on a page,” I began, “although I can easily imagine that it might feel this way at times. I think that the words on the page and the life of Jesus correspond to something that we all feel inside, something we all long for.” I asked how many of them were fathers. Ninety percent of the hands went up. We talked about how we feel about our kids, about how even when they make dumb decisions, we still love them, how we would do almost anything for them. I told the story about how my grown son (with whom I do not always see eye-to-eye) called me from a forest somewhere in Ontario (he was doing training with the Armed Forces) on Father’s Day to say hello, and about how he signed off by saying, “Love you, dad” and about how I almost fell apart at those three words. There were some knowing nods at this point.

“This comes from somewhere,” I said. “That love that we feel, that longing to be loved like that, that ache we get when it’s absent… these are clues to what we were made for.” It was an existential argument, I suppose. An argument from experience. Something to try to lift the words off the page and into their lives. Something to try to communicate the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s love for each and every one of these weary faces around the circle.

In the most recent edition of the Red Hand Files, Nick Cave was asked by a guy named Josh about his own relationship with faith and doubt. He responded in part thus:

Still, Josh, I live for the moments my disbelief loosens its hold and allows me to experience that lovely lightness of spirit—that elevated oneness with things, that feels like God, that feels like love.

Maybe, in the end, my disbelief will win the battle for my soul. But I hope not. That would feel like a terrible diminishment, like relinquishing the most interesting part of oneself and so, like art, like love, I attend to that religious impulse in order to keep the spiritual flame alive and vital.

Love is indeed the most interesting and vital part of ourselves. It points beyond itself. It resists diminishment at every turn. It is our origin and our destination, our source and our station.

After the twenty minutes were up and the guys were filing back to the unit, I approached the young man who asked the question. “I want to thank you for saying what you did,” I said. “That took courage. And I guarantee you weren’t the only one in the room who felt that way. I’m a pastor, and I feel that way sometimes!” He smiled. I screwed up my own courage and asked, “What did you make of what I said about love? Did it make sense?” I braced for the response.

He looked at his feet for a few seconds before meeting my gaze again. “Yeah, maybe. I don’t know.” He took his place in the line that was beginning to file out. And then, just as he walked past me, “But I liked what you said about your son.”

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