Beloved

I've been reflecting on what it means to be "loved" by God, and what all that entails. It is said over and over that God is a God of Love, but I think we sometimes misunderstand what "love" means.
Mirriam Webster defines love as "strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties", and God certainly feels this for us. The ties He has with us are the incredibly interpersonal ties between the Creator and His creation--yet, even this does not do it justice. We in our human terms cannot ever fully encompass what it means to be loved by God; however, I'm willing to take a stab at trying to explain a bit of it. 

Our relationship with love is a complex one. When we are little children, we come to an age where we start to find another child of the opposite sex especially interesting and thus want to tease them and get their attention. When we get a bit older, it manifests in the desire to be in a relationship and to experience life with another person whom we care deeply for. When we become parents, it is doing whatever we can to look out for our children's best interests, even if it goes against what pleases them.
While the Father never teases us or desires our attention in the same juvenile way that a little boy wants to pull a little girl's hair, we can see echoes of His love for us in the other two. (Why? Because we are made in His image, and so--even in our brokenness--we can reflect aspects of His perfect nature.) He cares for us deeply and wants to be involved in our lives and carry our burdens. He is the perfect Father and loves us in a way that calls us higher and looks out for our best interests, even when it clashes with what we think is best.

It is in the third example that this truth is really highlighted: love is more than just granting every desire of the beloved. True love is much more about pointing the beloved back to the right path, regardless of whether or not they want to walk on it because the Lover knows what is truly in the beloved's best interests. C.S. Lewis sums Divine Love up very well in his book, The Problem of Pain, one of my personal favorites.

"Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness...There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness (in the sense given above) is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object and even something like contempt of it...Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering...If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense."

To be loved by the Father does not mean having every desire of your heart fulfilled. Being loved by the Father means that He has committed Himself to the perfecting of you--His beloved--until the day you can be with Him in Paradise. True and perfect Love does not just want us to escape suffering, it wants us to grow and learn from our trials, meaning that sometimes suffering must be endured. But to be loved by Him also comes with the assurance that He will never leave nor forsake us and that He will stay by our sides and listen when we cry out to Him. It means that, though not always in the ways we expect or ask for, our prayers WILL be answered. For in His love, He does not merely ask that we endure trials to test the genuineness of our faith (1 Peter 1:6-9) but promises to walk through those trials with us and be our place of rest and safety.

And so, because we are loved in such a beautiful and complex way, we can truly rejoice like Habakkuk knowing that a lack of fruit on the vines or herd in the stalls does not equal an absence of true Love. Because true Love is so much more than mere kindness. And that is the greatest kindness of all.