I’d like to propose that God’s love is much different and better than unconditional. Unconditional love, as most of us understand it, begins and ends with sympathy and empathy, with blanket acceptance. It accepts you as you are with no expectations. You in turn can take it or leave it. But think about what God’s love for you is like. God does not calmly gaze on you in benign affirmation. God cares too much to be unconditional in His love… Such real love is hard to do. It is so different from “You’re okay in my eyes. I accept you just because you’re you, just as I accept everybody. I won’t judge you or impose my values on you.” Unconditional love feels safe, but the problem is that there is no power to it. When we ascribe unconditional love to God, we substitute a teddy bear for the king of the universe… The word “unconditional” may be an acceptable way to express God’s welcome, but it fails to communicate its purpose: a comprehensive and lifelong rehabilitation, learning “the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.”

David Powlison

CATEGORY	CUISINE	TAG	YIELD
Dairy		Dressing	1	Servings

INGREDIENTS

1	lg	Ripe avacado
1/2	c	Sour cream
1/4	c	Milk
1	tb	Grated onion
1/2	ts	Salt (up to)
3	dr	Garlic juice
1/8	ts	Black pepper
1	tb	Fresh lime juice

INSTRUCTIONS

Peel & cup up avacado. Whirl in blender with milk & sour cream. Add
remaining ingredients & blend until smooth. Place avacado seed in middle of
dressing to avoid discoloration. Seal tightly & chill before serving.
MRS HILLIARD (CAROL) LEWIS
From the <The Bliss of Cooking Returns>, Fort Bliss Officers Wives Club,
Ft. Bliss, TX.  Downloaded from Glen's MM Recipe Archive,
http://www.erols.com/hosey.

A Message from our Provider:

“Quit griping about your church; if it was perfect, you couldn’t belong.”

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. If it were possible for a created soul fully to “appreciate,” that is, to love and delight in, the worthiest object of all, and simultaneously at every moment to give this delight perfect expression, then that soul would be in supreme blessedness. To praise God fully we must suppose ourselves to be in perfect love with God, drowned in, dissolved by that delight which, far from remaining pent up within ourselves as incommunicable bliss, flows out from us incessantly again in effortless and perfect expression. Our joy is no more separable from the praise in which it liberates and utters itself than the brightness a mirror receives is separable from the brightness it sheds.

C.S. Lewis