Simple Fractions

My kids are getting pretty good at reducing fractions. They can, for example, figure out that multiples of two could divide evenly into both the numerator and denominator of 6/16. (And, for that matter, most of them could explain that 3 is a multiple that only works with the numerator, because the sum of the digits in the denominator, seven, is not divisible by three.) For third graders, they’ve been doing quite well.

I, on the other hand, am still having trouble with 1/2. I keep forgetting that “a half-truth is still a lie until it finds its other half.” And so, forging into half-lies, I fumble with what really is “whole.”

It’s all too easy to start with ideas that never ‘meet their other half.’ For example, a favorite line of attack is often that, because I can see my own unworthiness, I am therefore unlovable. What I stop at is my own character. What I fail to perceive is that God’s character contains the other half.

We are “unlovable,” and yet not “unloved.” We are unworthy of God’s attention and favor, and yet, those are still bestowed, because of His nature. As one pastor has put it, “We are not loved because we are worthy; rather, our lives have worth because we are loved by Almighty God.”

For many, the human condition is the only ‘half’ that’s considered (and, sadly, taken as the ‘whole’ truth). But if we fail to recognize the ‘half’ that completes it, if all we are stirred to believe is that we have precluded ourselves from love by who we have been, then we are not rightly seeing the nature of the One who has made us.

And His nature is displayed in this:

“‘For you are a holy people to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for His own possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. The LORD did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but because the LORD loved you and kept the oath which He swore…’” (Deuteronomy 7:6-8).

The reality with which we must grapple (the ‘half-truth’ which He will faithfully complete in the quiet recesses of our unsuspecting heart) is that “we” are not the deciding factor; that, in fact, we have no hand in whether God lavishes upon us His ‘great love’ (1 John 3:1). For the other ‘half,’ the part which makes our lives complete and yields our ‘wholeness,’ is that we – who are, by our very condition, unable to incite, entreat, or secure the love of a Holy God – remain the recipients of that unmerited blessing, and not because of our efforts, but simply because Christ has elected Himself to be the Giver.

“So then,” as Romans 9:16 states clearly, “it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy.”