How easy it is to allow ourselves to be offended by someone's comment to us on Facebook, or by their annoying (to us) personality traits. Our spouse doesn't understand what we want. Our children don't do their chores, or, if they're grown, don't call or email or skype us often enough - and never listen to our perfect advice about how to live their lives.
Why, on some days, we'd swear that we're the only normal, mature, loving people of our acquaintance! And that includes God. God is on our Hit List whenever life doesn't go the way we have decided that it should. Our love for God ebbs and flows on the tides of our fickle, changeable emotions.
Considering how judgmental, perfectionist, and thin-skinned we are, is it any wonder that we picture God as being made in our image - judgmental, perfectionist, and thin-skinned? Always changing His mind and His love for us? But God is none of those things.
At Jesus' Last Supper, Philip says to Jesus "Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us."
Jesus replies, "Have you been with me for so long a time, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on my own. The Father who dwells in me is doing His works."
Jesus says this after he has washed his followers' feet and told them to be servants and wash one another's feet. Jesus has shown them the Face and Hands of God - always at our loving service, as we should serve others.
If we want to know what God is like, how unchanging God's love is, we only have to look at and listen to Jesus, Son of God, who perfectly reveals his Father to us. And Jesus tells us that our Father is the Father of the wayward, Prodigal Son, who welcomes him home, no questions asked. Our God does not want sinners stoned or lepers isolated. Our God wants us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked - without judging them or deciding if they are worthy or unworthy. Our God continues to forgive us as he dies on a cross because of our sins, revealing the heights and depths of sacrificial, unconditional love for us.
On our worst day, Jesus tells us, God's love flows over us, steady and sure as a lighthouse lamp flooding unquiet seas. God never turns the Light of His Face away from the stormy seas of our thin-skinned, manipulative, judgmental emotions, or our selfish deeds. The only change is our turning away from Him.
And every time we are at our worst and we turn away from God, accuse God of not loving us, of mistreating us, of asking too much from us, we can hear Jesus calling our name and saying "Have you been with me for so long a time and you still do not know me?"
And then Jesus, Son of God and One with his Father, shows us his bloody, sacred death wounds by which we are healed. Because only perfect Love that loves to the death of self can ever heal anyone. Only being held by the steady, and steadfast wounded Hands of God can save us!