The election of man – biblically – is such an odd (and beautiful) thing if you think about it, I mean, isn’t it?
To think we were chosen, created, loved, elevated, and redeemed.
But not by something lower than us that wanted or needed something, but by that which is complete without us.
I think we understand unconditional love better with time. Some of us experience it with parents, siblings, and children.
And somehow the manifestation of life itself unconditionally loves you?
That’s worth leaning into.
It can make you feel incalculably precious…
If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed. Before and behind all the relations of God to man, as we now learn them from Christianity, yawns the abyss of a Divine act of pure giving—the election of man, from nonentity, to be the beloved of God, and therefore (in some sense) the needed and desired of God, who but for that act needs and desires nothing, since He eternally has, and is, all goodness. And that act is for our sakes. It is good for us to know love; and best for us to know the love of the best object, God. But to know it as a love in which we were primarily the wooers and God the wooed, in which we sought and He was found, in which His conformity to our needs, not ours to His, came first, would be to know it in a form false to the very nature of things.
-C.S. Lewis, The Problem Of Pain (Amazon)
