In many years of working with individuals struggling with addiction and mental health issues, I regularly heard a word loaded with significance, a word that can have devastating negative consequences or ecstatic positive ones. It’s a word that speaks of a profound principle God has built into creation. The word is ‘attachment.’
In the movie, Fly Away Home, we see an example of this principle when Canadian Geese goslings attach themselves to a fourteen year old girl and will only follow her. Consequently, when she flies in an airplane, the geese dutifully trail behind all the way from Canada to their new home in North Carolina.
God built the same attachment principle into human beings. Newborn babies must emotionally attach to mothers and/or other loving adults. If they do not, they are at far higher risk for a host of negative consequences including drug addiction, mental health problems, crime etc.
Jim Wilder, co-author of The Other Half of Church: Christian Community, Brain Science, and Overcoming Spiritual Stagnation, has a doctorate in brain science. He says that from a brain perspective, attachment is the most powerful force in us, stronger than the sexual instinct, stronger even than life itself. It is what causes parents to run into burning buildings to save a child even when they will likely die trying.
Wilder also has a masters in theology and refers to himself as a “neurotheologian.” He wondered, “If God has built attachment so powerfully into creation, should we not see it in the bible?” It didn’t take him long to find it there.
Perhaps the most theologically significant word in the Old Testament is hesed for which there is no exact English equivalent. It is sometimes translated ‘love,’ ‘kindness’ or ‘mercy,’ but there’s something more to it, more commitment, more grit–more attachment. Phrases such as ‘steadfast love,’ ‘faithful love,’ or ‘unfailing love’ better express the meaning of hesed and so are used more often by translators.
The astounding good news is that hesed, this attachment kind of love, is exactly how God loves us. God promises that even though the earth be in total chaos, his hesed–love for us will hold fast.
God’s tie to us is stronger than the strongest human relationships. He asks, “Can a woman forget her nursing child…?” A rhetorical question with, “No, she cannot,” as the obvious answer. But God goes further. He says even if that unlikely event were to occur, his love for us will not fail. His attachment to us is even stronger than a nursing mother’s to her baby!
The foundation of Christianity and the theme of the whole bible is that God loves us with “a love that will not let me go.”
Because he is so attached to you, Jesus ran into a burning building knowing he was going die just so he could pull you out. No matter how unworthy you feel, no matter how negative your self talk is, no matter how many times you have tried and failed, only “one thing is necessary”–faith in this overwhelming, everlasting attachment-love of God.
No wonder Paul cries out triumphantly, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Next time we will look at the astounding, impossible command that we have this same attachment-love for one another that God has for us.
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