That baby squirrel walked right up to Daddy out of the farm stubble.

It’s no wonder; he’d found its poor mama floating in the cow trough only days earlier.

He named the baby Sadie and kept her alive on homemade peanut butter until Dr. Ben, the town healer, recommended a special milk formula.

She thinks my parents are her own, because when she looked up at them and asked with her eyes, Will you love me?, the answer was yes.

 

 

Last night I closed my eyes to have a conversation with God.

I let my mind wander over America the Beautiful… all the fires, everywhere fires.

Screaming has become a font.

And I asked God, What do You hear?

In my spirit, I saw His answer.

I saw the whole thing, like a silent movie, fist-pumping violence, the selfie-obsession, raging sons and daughters, weeping mothers… all mid-shriek, mid-hatred… but no sound.

Instead, their words were all replaced with one question: Am I loved?

Am I loved…

Is that what God hears rising out of the ache we create?

 

The Question seems presumptuous at first, until we remember, our God is Love.

Then it becomes possible to believe there’s an ancient, sinister, anti-God conspiracy to convince every last created son and daughter, You are not loved.

 

I was afraid… so I hid myself.

~ Genesis 3:10

 

Suddenly we see, we have our work cut out for us.

All of human interaction is bated with The Question.

Rebellion asks it loudest.

Am I loved, no matter what?

It seems impossible to even care whether traitors who were once neighbors know whether they’re loved—until I realize God is telling His Story through us.

To us and to them.

It is the Cross, bitter splinters and thorns drawing the sweat-blood that begs, Is there no other way?

The world might not care if they’re loved by us, no more than we care to love those who crush all that we cherish.

But God cares for them to know He loves them, and that Cross—isn’t about punishment.

We’ve been asked to bear His love.

We’ve been asked to swallow back hatred and offer the forgiveness that changed us in an instant to children of the Forgiver.

What if it’s our nation’s deepest heart-cry…

Am I loved?

If so, can we become humble enough to hear it ourselves?

It can’t excuse every vile thing that happens to our nation’s family, but it sure sheds Light on a lot of it.

We’re tested daily by strangers brushing past us, by our families, by our children.

Their tempers and shortcomings, successes and choices, provoke a reaction from us of some kind, which inadvertently answers The Question with a simple yes, or no.

Yes, you are loved.

No, you are not loved.

We answer it a thousand ways.

 

I’m oversimplifying things a bit, I know, but the answer to The Question seems lately to be a megaphone NO, isolating and dividing us like a pharmacist separating pills.

We’ve got to start over.

We’ve got to assume every soul we encounter is inwardly motivated by The Question, Am I loved?

As servants of Love Incarnate, we have no choice but to ask God to help us answer The Question as often as we can in self-sacrificing ways that assure the greatest to the least of these, Yes, you are loved.

Because a world that cannot believe Christians love them, cannot believe in a Christ who loves them.

If we fail at this one thing, there is nothing else.

Yesterday, amazingly, after days of assuming all but Sadie were starved or caught by hawks, three more baby squirrels emerged from their hiding places on the farm and ran toward Mama and Daddy’s open hands.

Maybe that’s the start of a remedy to all the fist-clinching, to simply open our hands.

In this way, The Question is answered before it has to be asked.

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Love never, ever fails.

~ 1 Corinthians 13:8