The reason we can have such a great relationship with God is that God's indestructible.

The main reason we can have such a great relationship with God is that God is indestructible. There's no way we can hurt God, any more than what God already took on. But we can and do hurt each other. For that reason we need to realize that relationships with people are going to take more work. We can pretend and expect that we should enjoy the same degree of impunity in our relationship with others that many of us feel privileged to enjoy in our relationship with God, but in practice, that works better for us than it does for others. There's a difference between how a human can interact with God, and how a human can interact with fellow humans.

In some ways, we can steamroll right over God. We can take God for granted and substitute our will for God's - call our will God's will, call our imperfect understanding God's perfect plan. We can trump ourselves up to a perfect accordance with God, and God is most likely not going to complain. Maybe down the road - hopefully, every day, a little bit, our understanding changes as we learn. And sometimes we learn we were wrong. Wrong about God, maybe - and too often, wrong to others. With God maybe, we can feel already forgiven. We can feel like the wrong we did and the misunderstandings we embraced and acted on were no problem to God - because they weren't a problem to God. We lack the power to harm God, to meaningfully trespass against God. But there are plenty of people down here whom we do hurt.

God has no need of our pity or mercy, but we can't treat a person in a pitiless and merciless way. Allowances must be made for frailty and imperfection; particularly: for imperfect knowledge and imperfect trust. For the fact that another human does not know our heart directly. For the fact that another human can only take so much shit from us, before they lose their faith in what they thought we were. That's not their failing, it is ours. There are bad people in this world, you know. We believe that God knows that we're not one of them. Well, whatever the case may be, we can rest easy that God knows everything. Sometimes - one ought to admit - God knows the case better than we do.

But what about the people around us? The ones who don't know everything? What do they know? Only what we've done to them. How have we treated those who are not indestructible, but fragile? Do they think we are "bad people"?

A good way to start answering that question would be to ask another: does it matter to us, what they think?