This weekend's sermon was just what the doctor ordered to reviatalize my upcoming week. I confess, I have skipped the past four weekends and I feel the softening of my spirit when this happens.

The basis for this weekend's teachings is that all human beings have an inborn desire for God. Whether we are consciously religious or not, this desire is our deepest longing and our most precious treasure. It gives us meaning. Some of us have repressed this desire, burying it beneath so many other interests that we are completely unaware of it. Or we may experience it in different ways — as a longing for wholeness, completion, or fulfillment.

Regardless of how we describe it, it is a longing for love. It is a hunger to love, to be loved, and to move closer to the Source of love. This yearning is the essence of the human spirit; it is the origin of our highest hopes and most noble dreams.

Modern theology describes this desire as God given. In an outpouring of love, God creates us and plants the seeds of this desire within us. Then, throughout our lives, God nourishes this desire, drawing us toward fulfillment of the two great commandments: "Thou shalt love thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself."

Bear with me a moment as a draw a picture of a line symbolizing God's love in the middle. On one end of the spectrum is Repression. Why do we repress? That is easy to explain....we frequently repress our desire for love because love makes us vulnerable to being hurt. Ouch! The word passion, which is used to express strong loving desire, comes from the Latin root passus, which means "suffered." All of us know that, along with bringing joy, love can make us suffer. Often we repress our desire for love to minimize this suffering. This happens after someone spurns our love. I know you are hearing me on this one........tell me you have not given everything to a freindship or intimate relationship only to be hurt in the end. Now, to protect ourselves the next time, we stifle our desire. This is a normal human response.

But how does this relate to God's love? Let me explain. Simply put, God does not always come to us in the pleasant ways we might expect, and so we repress our desire for God. We want to love God and love LIKE God, but when we get hurt, we repress a desire. We try to keep our focus on other things — safer things.

Before I get too far along, let's not forget the other end of the spectrum. The side furthest from repression and perhaps the opposite of repression, is Addiction.

Addiction, the other force that turns us away from love, is much more vicious than repression. While repression stifles desire, addiction attaches desire to certain specific behaviors, things, or people. These objects of attachment, whether it be alcohol, ideas, work, sex, drugs, fantasies, power, relationships, etc, then become preoccupations and obsessions........they come to rule our lives. The word attachment has long been used by spiritual traditions to describe this process. It comes from the old French word, atache, meaning "nailed to." Thus, attachment "nails" our desire to specific objects and creates addiction. In this light, we can see why addiction is the most powerful psychic enemy of humanity's desire for God. The Bible says, place no other Gods (idols) before me.

I am not being flippant when I say that all of us suffer from addiction. Nor am I reducing the meaning of addiction. We are all addicts in every sense of the word. I'm and addict, and you're an addict. Moreover, our addictions are our own worst enemies. We give ourselves over to things that, in our deepest honesty, we really do not want. There are times when each of us can easily identify with the words of the apostle Paul: "I do not understand my own behavior; I do not act as I mean to, but I do the things that I hate. Though the will to do what is good is in me, the power to do it is not; the good thing I want to do, I never do; the evil thing which I do not want--that is what I do. In writing these words, Paul was talking about sin.

Theologically, sin is what turns us away from love — away from love for ourselves, away from love for one another, and away from love for God.

Take a note to self........breaking through to what God has for each of us, calls for a deep love for God. This boils down to trust. Trust in the Lord, Teach me Your way O' Lord, Thou shall love thy God with all thy heart.

Have a great week blogger buds!