Tough Love and Tender Mercies

I have been pondering how our relationship with our Father in Heaven sometimes feels like tough love and sometimes it feels like tender mercies. Now, our Father's love for us does not diminish or abate, it will not be altered, it can not be dismissed or ignored, but will continue with the same intensity, suffused with the same warmth, enriched by the same understanding, buoyed by the same infinite hope from long before we were born and continuing for long after we die. If the quality and the character and the strength of God's love remains constant from moment to moment throughout our lives, then why does it sometimes feel like tough love and sometimes it feels like tender mercies? We are undeserving of even the toughest of God's love so it can't be that He only gathers us in with tenderness when we are righteous and worthy enough because we could never be righteous or worthy enough. So the toughness and tenderness of God's love must have more to do with our perception and understanding of what work God is trying to accomplish on our behalf, than on any kind of disposition that God has towards us. We perceive God's love as being tough when our attitudes and pursuits are out of sync with God's great plan for us. And perhaps we see God's mercies as being particularly tender when we have through hard lessons been brought down into the depths of humility and cannot help but acknowledge that in all His ways God is just and merciful and that we are undeserving of God's mercy but we are grateful for it anyway. God's love is unchanging, unfailing, unshakeable, undeniable and it is ours completely and wholly whether we want it or not, whether we deserve it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we think it tough or tender. When we feel God's love it is because, however willingly or grudgingly, we have allowed him into our heart. If our heart is hard then His love will feel tough because our hearts are tough and if our heart is soft then His love will feel tender because our hearts are tender. The more humility and gratitude and love that we can feel and direct toward God, the more tender will His mercies feel, the brighter will be the joy that illuminates our soul, the calmer and steadier will be our peace, and more and more of God's love will flood and fill and expand our hearts and our souls and our minds.