Overwhelmed . . .

by God’s Love

A Meditation by Alden Swan

I was thinking about God's love today as I drove into work, and realized more than ever that the subject of God's love is completely overwhelming. Just plain life, as we all know, can at times seem overwhelming; however, it's not nearly as overwhelming as trying to comprehend God's love for us. If anything, we should be comforted by the fact that God's love out-overwhelms everything else.

How can we possibly understand the extent of God's love for us? We have no other satisfactory model to go by; by definition, anything that we can comprehend is not adequate.

 
I grew up knowing that God loved me. I have never, ever, doubted God's love. However, my concept of God's love was severely limited and flawed. As a result, I have always felt safe with God, but there wasn't anything special about it. After all, God loved everyone, even the completely clueless and unlovable. I saw God's love as something that He pretty much had to do. The story that I lived my life in said that my parents loved me more or less because they were my parents, not because I was in any way lovable. God loved me even more, unconditionally, but not because I was special. It was because I belonged to the universal set of things that God loved. So, the defective story I lived didn't make me feel special; I still felt like a loser most of the time, loved because God loves losers.

I am discovering, though, that God's love is so much more vast, and qualitatively different than the love I understood. Still, there is little available, outside of God's love itself, to clue me in to what it's really like. The love of my wife and the love of my children is wonderful, but as great as that love may be, it has limits -- conceivably, there are things that I could do that could affect that love. God's love remains unaffected. So, while elements of that love can clue me in to little pieces of God's love, it's not adequate to clue me in to either it's vastness or it's flavor. Passionate love, too, reveals a small bit of God's love. However, human passion comes in bursts and has way too many limitations to be a true representation.

God's love stands as something completely outside of ordinary human experience (that is, outside of our natural ability to love and be loved). Our knowledge of God's love comes only when we directly experience it. Logic would seem to indicate, then, that God's love must be reality, since we couldn't have conceived of something so outside the realm of our own comprehension. It would also seem, then, that God's love must be our starting point, for everything. There are those who believe that our ability to understand and know truth is our foundation; however, anything that I can begin to understand must have limitations, and is therefore imperfect and inadequate and untrustworthy. As with gravity, I don't have to understand God's love to know that it exists, and that it is reliable.

God's love stands outside of our understanding. It exists without any external definition. It is incredibly real, incomprehensibly vast, and at the same time personal. I don't think that we can respond fully to God's love by any ordinary means, because God's love is no ordinary love. God's love reaches out to each of us individually with laser-like intensity, calling us to step out of our boats to meet Jesus walking on the water, or to grasp the hem of his garment. God's love calls us to step out of our story, our concept of reality, into God's story - into the inconceivable reality of God's love.

Like the humorous story that doesn't translate well into words, we have to "be there." Mere words are not adequate, and no human experience compares. We only know of God's love as He reaches out to us, and I have no doubts whatsoever that God's love is always reaching out to us. What can possibly keep God's love from us? However, I wonder if sometimes, again, like with gravity, we just aren't aware of it until we decide to test it. Where is God's love reaching out to you? Where are you being healed? Where is God's love calling you?

And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from his love.
Death can't, and life can't.
The angels can't, and the demons can't.
Our fears for today, our worries about tomorrow,
and even the powers of hell can't keep God's love away.
Whether we are high above the sky or in the deepest ocean,
nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us
from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord. 
Romans 8:38,39