The Nature of God

There's a reason I don't talk religion or politics here. It's clearly not because I'm focused and can avoid rambling about random things--I just don't want to see my little corner turned into a debate ground.
So we're going to say that this post has nothing to do with religion, because it doesn't mkay?

When I was 11 or 12 I read a series of books called Conversations with God. In all fairness, I don't have a good recollection of the books. I do remember thinking that the guy who wrote them might be terribly delusional, but I was willing to let that go because some of it made a lot of sense to me.

Two of the things that I do remember are the concept of God being love and existing within all of us as opposed to being an external construct, and that fear, not hate, was the opposite of love.

I found the preposition that fear was the opposite of love to be...Not compatible with my view of hate as being the opposite of love.
I have however, found that love and fear are intrinsically entwined for me.

Opposites are necessary for life as we know it--without dark there is no light, we cannot truly appreciate pleasure if we have never known pain, and perhaps we could never know love if we did not also know fear.

Getting to the moral of the story...

Before falling in love, I had no fear of death. Admittedly, I was young enough not to have a great grasp of the speed with which life passes by. But my knowledge that life was finite didn't bother me. I saw death as merely an inevitable culmination of life.
I still do, and I'm still not terribly afraid of the finality of it in terms of my own life. But the concept of existing without that which I love most? That is very scary to me.

Perhaps God is love, and fear is its opposite.
When we really and truly love, we know the fear of losing that love.
Perhaps without that fear of loss, we could never really know what it is to love beyond ourselves.
Perhaps when we love something beyond ourselves, and we hold fear's hand, we come to another understanding of God.
Because without darkness there is no light.
Without pain there is no pleasure.
Without that which is unclean, we cannot revel in that which is pure.
Without severity we cannot know grace.
And without death, there is no life.

Perhaps the nature of God lies in knowing and experiencing the opposing factors of existence.

I spilled my first cup of coffee this morning. Can you tell?