How Do I Know God Loves Me?

Someone asked me recently how I know God loves me. I found it interesting because it presupposes that we could even know God. As a mystic-leaning person of faith, I’d argue that we could never know God. Anything we can conceptualize, anything we can imagine is not God. It couldn’t be. God is beyond and better what we could hope, dream, or imagine.

And, in the same breath as a mystic-leaning person of faith, I agree with the concept that while God cannot be known, God can be experienced.

It’s like Love. What is it? A feeling or an action? Both? Is it mushy feelings between lovers? The affection of a parent to their child? Is it the feeling of being held by the Earth and nature? Is it that sense of awe when you see a sunrise or a sunset? Is it a friend sharing a beer?

Is it the sorrow we feel when we lose someone to death? Is it a longing for physical intimacy? Is it sex?

Is Love all of these things? And isn’t Love also beyond all of these things? Nothing we do or say fully encapsulates this Love, this inescapable, indescribable, uncontainable, theoretical and practical concept, feeling, action.

But Love can be experienced. We know it when we feel it. We know it when we lack it. We know when we need it.

And so how do I know God loves me. Because I experience it.

I experience it in the mushy feeling I feel towards a lover and the way that my mother loves me so well. I experience it when I sit under the stars and hear the wind in the trees, when I see the sun and the moon. I experience when I’m singing karaoke with my friends and finishing my third beer. I experience it when I mourn the loss of my father and my grandmother and my friends. I experience it when I am lonely and need to reach out. I experience it in the physical pleasure of my body.

I know God loves me because I love me.

So. Same question. How do you know God loves you? Do you know God loves you? How do you experience that Love?