His Immeasurable Love
- Bailey
- Jul 20, 2014
- 3 min read
These past three weeks I’ve had the incredible privilege to witness God’s glory in ways I never could have imagined. I’ve spent two weeks in Guatemala, a country that has an increasingly tight grasp of my heart, for the third summer in a row. I have also just returned home from vacationing in the mountains of New Mexico with my family and a dear friend. Both of these trips have taught me one valuable lesson: God has chosen to love me in ways so complex and wonderful that I can respond in no other way than by surrendering myself to Him more, loving Him more, and worshiping Him more.
This year at House of Hope, Guatemala, the Lord moved in me in ways I couldn’t fully understand until I arrived home. In fact, the entire “lesson” God had been teaching me didn’t really register until the following week on vacation where God truly spoke to me through His Word.
After returning to the states, and even in the process of packing and driving away from the home in Guatemala I have grown to love, I could physically feel the pain in my heart from having to leave. My heart has never experienced these kinds of emotions in the way God gave them to me there: head-over-heels for a country itself, burdened by the need of so many of His precious ones, heartbreak over good-byes, and sorrow at the desperateness of situations.
You see, our Almighty God, Creator of the Universe, could choose for us to have “head knowledge” of His love, His grace, His infinite power, yet He has chosen to “make known to us the path of life(Ps. 16:11)” instead; He lets us experience the way He feels about us in ways so much more beautiful and exhilarating than just knowing. Yes, as a creation of God we have an innate knowledge of Him, but to “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (Eph. 3:19)” is true life, it’s true feelings, for “in [His] presence there is fullness of joy (Ps. 16:11)”.
In the last month I have felt emotions in this way without knowing it. I have felt love through sweet goodbye kisses of little children in Guatemalan villages. I have felt sorrow and pain through the desperate prayers of a mountain village church. I have felt jubilation at being sought out by old friends. I have felt intense sadness at leaving people who have captured my heart.
God has chosen to reveal his love and his goodness not all at once, but rather to scatter it all around my life in tiny glimpses–through precious Guatemalan children, through a most understanding friend, through His magnificent creation–because God “being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together in Christ”. I am alive in Christ, and I experience His love in the everyday life, not just the big moments.
God has done this “so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus”. He displays his infinite grace in kindness, not any other way, but through kindness. This is something so evident in my daily life, yet so often missed.
Because of this important lesson the Lord has taught me this past month I will continue to seek Him out in my life. I will cherish the people around me more because they are a beautiful gift and a tangible source of His love for me. I will live more gratefully and more carefree because of the way I’ve seen life lived in another culture. Most importantly, however, I will live and glorify and enjoy the One who makes all things new, the One whom my soul longs for, more than anything, more than ever.
