Extravagant Love

I picture Him standing there with the weight of a rugged cross pressing into His torn, ragged flesh. The excruciating pain fills His mind with a haze and all He can do is turn heavenward. Pain does that sometimes; reminds us of what's important and where our help comes from. 

But there is something in His eyes that halts us. The mocking passerby won't see it. The terrified children might miss it. The soldiers pounding nails and throwing lots for his clothes gloss over it. Only the one looking closely, perhaps his closest disciples, will see it. His eyes hold a heavenly light. A light that points to something so endearing and so enduring that it causes our breath to gasp and our bodies to still. "There is a purpose here," we say. Something so vast and infinite that we cannot wrap our minds around it, much less grasp it with our hands. 

His eyes hold the light of love. True, piercing, redeeming love. It is the kind that stops a sinner in his tracks, the kind that holds a panicked child still in strong arms, the kind that makes a haughty spirit bow down in surrender, the kind that lifts the hopeless to his feet, and the kind that breaks through mountains of defeat and humanly-manufactured walls of defense. It cuts to the heart of the most carefully guarded and softens the most violent anger. 

I know no other force on earth that can work so intricately and so strongly as this. It has caused me to sit back and marvel. Why for me? Why for you?

I asked God one time, why He did all that? I'm not sure that I'll ever completely understand the entire answer but one thing I came away with is that I ought to share it. 

And I see it. God's true people are full of this love. They forgive when others press charges. They love when others walk away. They give second chances when the first is blown. They keep investing when the results are grim. They walk into the lives of those who are down and out. Why? Because they were loved first. Because they KNOW the absolute life-changing, life-giving result of love and they want others to have it. 

You are loved. More than you can ever grasp, more than your biggest failures or smallest secrets, more than your defects and flaws; you are loved IN SPITE of them all. In fact, Your redemption was paid for while you were still in the middle of it all. Accept it. Believe it. It is finished. ❤️