Stealing Kisses

I have a 13 month little girl, who of course is the cutest baby on the planet.  One of the most frustrating things for me as a daddy who so loves this little girl is that I just want to kiss her little face ten thousand times.  But she rarely if ever kisses me back.  She isn't a cuddler much and so affection from her is rare and greatly treasured.  So whenever I get to hold her and carry her either up or down the stairs or to and from some place, I use the opportunity to steal a few kisses.  I'm her daddy, after all.  She tolerates it enough, and occasionally I get one back!

In all honesty there's something else to this: I know she needs it.  This little girl needs to know that I love her, she is precious to me, and that she is safe with me.  She doesn't even know how much she needs that assurance, because I am glad to say she has never gone without it.  I have been around those who haven't had the affection of a father or mother.  I have been to foreign places where affection is so rare that children who don't even know you climb in your lap, and put their heads on your shoulders craving to know they are significant in the eyes of someone.  They need this.

And we need it too, most especially from God, the source of the perfect love, the perfect reassurance, the perfect acceptance.  And I realize that all my life God has been chasing me, time after time, stealing kisses...  A sunset that caught my heart.  A bright starry sky in Colorado.  A friend who comes up beside me and prays for me.  My wife, when she looks at me and tells me she believes in me.  A church service where God speaks straight to me and comforts my fears.  All love comes from God, because he invented it.  God wants to love me.

Isaiah 30:15 says, "This is what the Sovereign LORD, the Holy One of Israel, says: 'In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it.'"

Do we realize that in the loving arms of God is the strength to live?  Do we realize that in rest and quietness with him we find the love and acceptance that heals the wounds of the world and give us an renewed courage and faith that we can make it?  So often though, we will "have none of it."  We push the snooze, jump frantically into the shower and rush off.  Our prayers are quick, desperate, and over meals if at all.  The Bible is dusty and rarely opened except maybe at church.

So God resorts to stealing kisses, loving us anyway, but grieving that we don't realize what we could have... if we loved him back.