(no subject)

Guest preacher Suzanne Woolston Bossert this morning mentioned falling in love with God, and I had a visceral response which I think would best be described as fear. The idea of God as Lover has come up a bunch recently, and it's an idea I find interesting to explore, but I think the framing of "falling in love with" God triggered memories of negative experiences with people I have been in love with -- even though of course I know that part of the point is that God will never leave us or forsake us.

So I asked a friend about it on a bad day, her husband had just
Left her, and she sat down in the chair he left behind
She said, "What is love, where did it get me?
Whoever thought of love is no friend of mine."

[Unrelatedly, I'm curious which lectionary she has that she thinks the lectionary is giving us Matthew's parable of the sheep and the goats -- though she opted to use Matthew 18:1-5 (NRSV/The Message) instead -- since that's neither Christmas 2A nor Epiphany. Ah, digging on TextWeek informs me that it's New Year, January 1. I told facebook after I got home from church: Elizabeth is apparently even more irritated by "Happy New Year" in church today (the Church's New Year was over a month ago -- Advent 1) than by all the "lose weight" New Year's Resolutions she's been seeing.]