1 John 4:8
God is LOVE
8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
God shows Himself and gives us glimpses of Himself in some unusual ways...We are all created in the Image of God...And God is LOVE, so many times God shows Himself in acts of love and kindness...So somewhere in us there is this capability through His Holy Spirit to show love...Even in those who are our enemies and even in those we think as low life and even in the lowest of prisoners and convicts, God can show us His LOVE...
Author Philip Yancey wrote this about love and how he viewed the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky...Dostoevsky's most acclaimed works were Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880)...Yancey wrote this about the Russian Novelist: “Early in his life, Dostoevsky underwent a virtual resurrection. He had been arrested for belonging to a group judged treasonous by Tsar Nicholas I, who, to impress upon the young parlor radicals the gravity of their errors, sentenced them to death and staged a mock execution...A firing squad stood at the ready...Bareheaded, robed in white burial shrouds, hands bound tightly behind them, they were paraded through the snow before a gawking crowd...At the very last instant, as the order, “Ready, aim!” was heard and rifles were cocked and lifted, a horseman galloped up with a message from the tsar: he would mercifully commute their sentences to hard labor...Dostoevsky never recovered from this experience...He had peered into the maw of death, and from that moment life became for him precious beyond all calculation...“Now my life will change,” he said; “I shall be born again in a new form.”...As he boarded the convict train toward Siberia, a devout woman handed him a New Testament, the only book allowed in prison...Believing that God had given him a second chance to fulfill his calling, Dostoevsky pored over that New Testament during his confinement...After ten years he emerged from exile with unshakable Christian convictions, as expressed in a letter to the woman who had given him the New Testament, “If anyone proved to me that Christ was outside the truth … then I would prefer to remain with Christ than with the truth.”...Prison offered Dostoevsky another opportunity, which at first seemed a curse: it forced him to live at close quarters with thieves, murderers, and drunken peasants...His shared life with these prisoners later led to unmatched characterizations in his novels, such as that of the murderer Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment...Dostoevsky’s liberal view of the inherent goodness in humanity could not account for the pure evil he found in his cell mates, and his theology had to adjust to this new reality...Over time, though, he also glimpsed the image of God in the lowest of prisoners...He came to believe that only through being loved is a human being capable of love.”...