During an intense bout of sickness that nearly took her life, Julian of Norwich said that God showed her a “little secret” about an ordinary hazelnut. As she considered the vision of the hazelnut, she wondered, “What may this be?” and God answered her heart’s pondering: “It is all that is made…”
Julian then realized that the secret of the thing was not found in what it was, but in how it had its being. “In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, and the third, that God keeps it.” She then reasoned that if something exists, it is because God loves it into being, and therefore everything that exists is what it is because of the love of God who sustains and upholds it. What makes something real is God’s love, for love is the ground and context of all that exists.
This simple yet profound thought applies to our own lives as well. “What is he indeed that is Maker and Lover and Keeper?” We can only know who we really are in God’s love for our souls. And we see God’s love for us in the passion of the Lord Yeshua who clothed himself in our likeness to touch and to mediate the cry of our hearts before the Father. Amen, Yeshua is the one who brings us into God’s heart, “Between God and the soul there is no between.”
“I saw that He is to us everything that is good: God is our clothing that wraps, clasps and encloses us so as to never leave us, being to us everything that is good.” Amen. God loves us “ve’ahavat olam,” with an everlasting love, and He draws us to Himself in love:
- Jer. 31:3b Hebrew page (pdf)