The Language of Love

Wooing. Kind of a strange word. Wooing is not often used in today's language unless, perhaps, you have experienced the practice of courting.  To woo means "to seek the favor, affection or love of another."  Wooing is the language of love. It is an evocative way; a way that creates a hunger to know more, to draw closer, to discover, and to understand the one who woos. It is the stuff of relationships. Some of us come naturally to wooing--others have to learn the ways of wooing for relationships to develop.

When I use the word wooing to talk about relationship with God, I do so because God is love and because we can only love or respond to love because of God. We might not even know how to respond to divine love that is well beyond what we experience between each other here in the flesh. It  is, perhaps, because of how we have experienced human love that is in itself limited, that we might wonder what the experience of God's love can be. We may catch glimpses of the possibilities and may even fear what that love might demand of us. Fear about God and who God is may inhibit one's ability to respond to God. We get messed up about what love looks like when we look at each other instead of looking at God for our perspective.

We have been created to live in loving relationships--love that cares about the well-being of others--love that begins between oneself and God. Receiving God's love for oneself, and experiencing oneself as God's beloved, changes us. This is who we were created to be, God's beloved. This is who we are and can be in and through Christ. Christ demonstrated what real love looks like and Christ continues to show us about divine love. We really don't love well without God's kind of love changing us.

God is persistent in wooing us to Himself because God is love and God loves first; God persists in wooing us away from all that entangles, enslaves, and misdirects us away from God. God persists in inviting us to return to Him to receive the love He desires to lavish upon us. This is an invitation to the inner journey--going inward toward the One who dwells there, always present, always calling, always loving--to be able to experience God's love within. This is God's gift, the Holy Spirit, the mind of Christ, who comes to dwell within you. God will move in if you invite and allow him entry into your life. That is the beginning - God wants to take up residence within you for the sake of love. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love (Romans 5:5).

Caring for your soul, the very essence of who you are, means learning to pay attention and deepen your awareness of God's invitations. Cultivating and redirecting one’s awareness and attentiveness is necessary to the process of listening to this inner wooing--hearing and responding to the One who knows your name and who you are and who you are becoming. The drawing becomes like a magnetic love song; and as you are drawn closer and closer to the Source of all love, the magnetism becomes so great that you cannot move away—nor do you want to do so. In God, you find the ease to your soul’s longing, the living water that quenches your thirst, and the bread of life that fills your hunger. You discover the power and presence to resist that which tempts you away from this sweet space.The empty space of your soul becomes filled with the sweet presence of the Holy One.