We are children, perhaps, at the very moment when we know that it is as children that God loves us.

not because we have deserved his love and not in spite of our undeserving;

not because we try and not because we recognize the futility of our trying; but simply because he has chosen to love us.

We are children because he is our father;

and all of our efforts, fruitful and fruitless, to do good, to speak truth, to understand, are the efforts of children who, for all their precocity, are children still in that before we loved him, he loved us, as children, through Jesus Christ our lord.”

Frederick Buechner, from The Magnificent Defeat