The Wonder of Love

There’s a little, blonde, 1-and-1/2-year-old boy named Ezekiel who loves to run down the aisle of the auditorium when he sees me. As soon as I come into the church, he wriggles out of his mom’s arms and comes tottering down the aisle at full speed — sometimes a little wobbly — but arms stretched out and with the biggest smile and laughing the whole way until he reaches me. Can I just tell you what an amazing feeling that is to know that there’s someone who thinks the world of me and who gets that excited when he gets to see me. It means more than I can express in words. I can only imagine that parents of kids feel this type of thing all the time. What an honor and privilege it is to receive that kind of love! I was thinking about this as I was laying in bed at 2am, and I thought about God, and how He must feel sometimes. When we are in a time of worship or meditation and we get so excited and passionate … and suddenly … He’s there, in the room. We know it. We sense it. So we launch ourselves down the aisle, and we are laughing and crying and smiling and our arms are out and we are just waiting to be swept up into His arms and spun around because that is what every kid loves. 

The heart of God is so full of love because … 
He is love. 
He personifies love. 
He invented love. 
And He wants us to feel, know, experience …
His love.

Then I was thinking of this guy I follow online and lately he’s just been posting how he’s angry and hurt and disenfranchised by the election (2016) and is writing about evangelical Christians and how they don’t actually represent Christ anymore and the church is out of touch and, and, and … and I get it. Because my mind goes there too. It is so easy to get so wrapped up in my human thinking, so I put God into a box that I have constructed so that He works the way I want Him to. Surely God would never have allowed a misogynistic bully like Trump to get into office. Surely God wouldn’t allow sex trade to continue, or wars to destroy innocents. Surely God would do acts of justice and deal with all the wrongs. But it is all stuff that I put into who I think God should be or do (according to me). Then I get all Vulcan about it and start applying logic, reasoning, and science … and I make [God] hard and confusing and it’s not supposed to be that way. Right? I dunno sometimes. 

From the beginning he made it simple. Jesus sat there, teaching people and a couple kids came up and sat on his knee, and he looked at the folks he was talking to and basically said, “See these kids? They aren’t wise to the ways of the world. They don’t know about theology or doctrine or politics or all the stuff that jades us and makes us cynical. They possess something that many of you have lost along the journey. You say you are ‘realists’ or ‘practical’ or ‘rational’ but all that means is that you have lost your sense of wonder. Unless you become like one of these,” Jesus says, “you will never be able to get into my kingdom. Because access to my kingdom requires something ridiculous. Faith. You might not have scientific proof. My book might sound dated and irrelevant to the intellectuals who look over their glasses on it and scoff at those dim-witted folks who still believe those old stories written so long ago.”

Faith means that you have to become like a child — a child who believes that a pile of sticks on a scrubby island in the middle of a little creek is an incredible jungle island on the Amazon River with a fantastic fort surrounded by all kinds of danger and wild adventures. A child who believes in magic and dragons and unicorns and who still hears God talk to them and sees angels in their dreams. A child who hasn’t lost their imagination or their sense of simple belief. Simple trust. When I was 5, I believed in Jesus. There was no theology, no doctrine, no scientific principles, it was just my mom, telling me the stories of Jesus, and I just put my little boy’s innocent faith in Jesus — who loved the people of the world so much that he came to earth as a man and died for my sins and someday I will be with Him forever. That’s the good news of the gospel that has been preached for two thousand years; and people across the spectrum of humanity have chosen to put their faith in Jesus and they have felt His love. It’s unexplainable by science or psychology, because the Divine transcends all that.

Over the centuries, people have humbled themselves in private moments, in that “space behind the face” where it is just them and God, have become like children and dared to believe in someone they could not see; have reached out and accepted a gift freely given; and have experienced a change — of heart, of spirit, of mind. An awakening. To the multitudes like me who have dared, the Divine has come, knelt down at the end of the aisle, and waited as I came on wobbly legs, with my arms out and eyes shining to the One who loves me so much that He gave everything He had to rescue me. He picks me up and spins me around and says, “I love you my son; my daughter. I will never let you go. I got you. You are secure in my arms. No matter happens, I will always love you — and my love is so much more than you can ever fathom. For infinity and eternity.”