God keeps being God, even when ignored.

A clean freak will clean. A woodworker will find his or her shop and putter. Certain people are hardwired to do certain things—no matter what goes down, or how many things fall apart.

This is true for God. No matter how much humanity veers off course, God keeps God’s plan. Like the super cleaner or the woodworker, God keeps doing God’s “thing.”

What is God’s thing? What makes God—well—God?

The answer is love. Where there is love, there is God.

Interestingly, where there is not love does not mean God is absent; it means God is not experienced by some, many, or all.

God is not seen or experienced by some, many or all because we either push away God, or, as a consequence of someone else ignoring or pushing away God, God seems vacant or powerless.

But God IS God. How do we know this? The answer here is that God, as I said a moment ago, does not stop. Said differently, God’s plans don’t cease. In other words, we know God is God because no matter how far or how often we get off his course (and hot diggity dog, do we get off his course), God never stops redirecting us back to him.

I’ve been alluding to the master plan. Now I’m speaking to it directly. Proverbs 10:21, scripture I mentioned in a sermon recently, says this: You can make many plans, but the Lord’s purpose will prevail.

God is going to keep doing God’s thing not matter what happens. It is not God’s plan that teens end their own lives. It is not God’s plan that evil permeates homes, children suffer, animals experience abuse, and entire neighborhoods daily grind through violence.

But God takes this brokenness—ALL of this brokenness (yours, mine, and everyone else’s)—and reimagines, repurposes and realigns our godless, hellacious stories each and every time so that light can come from darkness, hope can come from despair, and life can come from loss. He simply and faithfully takes pain and let’s love come from it, or let’s love come out of it.

The love I speak of may not be love you see or experience in your lifetime, but it is there.

I’m told burnt wood can be good in a garden. Don’t burn an entire hedgerow and use the ashes as mulch for your flowerbed this summer, but from ruin comes rebirth. God uses the burned or broken pieces in our lives for something new. That something new always points to God. Oh, it can be stymied or stomped on time and time again. It may falter or all-out fail in human hands, but God is God: He’ll keep on—no matter what.