onto-relational chores

I should be writing this in the outline for our Small Group: Growing in Virtue, which convenes in T minus nine hours; but i'm working on getting into the Blog scene (why?!? call it corporate solidarity, community?, whatever, that's a different post altogether)

Love. That's tonight's virtue. I was just doing a whole lotta dishes and even though it's Lent, i had an epiphany. These kinds of things happen often while I'm working with my hands... whether doodling, landscaping, barista-ing, or in this case Husbandry (that means doing things around the house, right?). For whatever reason, God seems to have built into me a strong connection between my devotional thought-life and manual labor, for which I am quite thankful... i love doing both!

So, as i'm watching the sudsy bubbles of my hard work swirl down the drain, i make a connection between the nature of Trinitarian love and the water cycle... [pause for reflection] Okay, so to start with Trinitarian love, like you do: Before there was anything, there was God- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God in perfect community, giving and receiving love in perpetua. Then God said, "Let there be..." the God who be, called forth things outside Himself to be, so that the loving community could expand all the more. God also said that is was all good in the hood... rough translation of the gangsta Hebrew. In doing so, He was saying, "I love you- it is good that you exist!"

In order to prevent blog boredom or the blog shock i'm prone to inducing by means of huge long-winded posts, i'll drop the analogy here: The water that was used today to make my dishes clean was in some form existant when the Spirit was hovering over them. The nature of the water cycle is to evaporate and condense so that the same molecules have been around since the initial act of creation, there has been no new creation of water and water hasn't ever simply disappeared from existance.

In the same way, the nature of love is to be continualy in flux, transitioning from being given to being received, such that it is against the nature of love to be stagnant. Stagnation in love would be to try to receive love without giving it back. The Trinity is always in love, giving and recieving perfect love in community, similarly, knowing that God loves us and receiving that love must necessarily initiate the act of us loving in return and sharing in the same love that has existed since existance itself began to be being.