LOVE IN BOUNDLESS MEASURES

Today I said to my dear friend, "I am at the bottom of a pit with a magnifying glass."  She laughed at my choice of mind stopping descriptive terms for where I am.  But, she also responded with great compassion and encouragement for temporary pit dwelling and its necessity, much like a colon cleanse, for the soul-spirit-mind-and heart.  Parking my short bus on God's great love recently, I have been uncovering, dissecting and then embracing it without fully understanding or figuring it all out - trying to undo years of defining it which I suppose has limited me knowing it or experiencing it fully.  To define something limits it to what I can think and know.  I cannot think or know God's love from human bound eyes.  And, what I can has an end, a beginning and an end, it has boundaries as that's how I, as a human, view everything.  I have used the word "boundless" as an over exaggeration in referring to young children's energy.  But we all know, raising our own kids or being around them, they eventually run out of steam - at the table with food in their mouths, laid out in the bathtub, in the car, on the floor, in their beds.  They are not boundless.  But God's love is boundless - not bound by human expectations, limits, definitions, reasoning, or comprehension.  Today, in my pit dwelling, I literally called out God's love audibly to focus on it and not my surroundings in the pit - not anger, nor hurt, or disappointment, or unmet expectations, struggle, or grief.  Sitting over the heat vent after a run tonight I turned to Eugene Peterson's The Message Bible, asking God to give me something tangible, His voice to know of His great love which overrides and eclipses everything both in heaven and earth.  This is where I turned, Jeremiah 31:35-37ish (that version doesn't follow verses exactly) subtitled, If This Ordered Cosmos Ever Fell To Pieces.  It says this:

God's Message, from the God who lights up the day with sun and brightens

the night with moon and stars, who whips the ocean

into billowy froth, whose name is God-of-the-Angel-Armies:

If this ordered cosmos ever fell to pieces,

fell into chaos before me - GOD'S DECREE -

Then and only then might Israel fall apart

and disappear as a nation before me.

GOD'S MESSAGE:

If the skies could be measured with a yardstick

and the earth explored to its core,

Then and only then would I turn my back on Israel,

disgusted with all they've done.  GOD'S DECREE.



I am a connected and a grafted part of Israel, His example of God's nature in loving mankind.  HA, I said out loud as I read those words!!  That is never.  Never was God saying could He stop loving.  It is not His nature.  Ever.  Ever also includes when I am in the pit with a magnifying glass.  He is wanting to love me through letting it loose and only caring of His Great love, not the hurt or disappointment, a life of struggle, my own expectations of myself, uncertainty before me or grief that wants to eat me alive.  Trying to unleash my grip of a lifetime to hold what my humanness can of God's love, which ultimately probably is very little of it.  Make sense?