This is love

Today I had lunch with two of ‘my girls.’ We talked about serious stuff and silly stuff and spent no small number of words bragging on our men. I came home slightly lighter and even a slight lift is monumental when what you are carrying weighs forty million pounds. This is love.

Yesterday I sat in a room full of people who had gathered for no other purpose than to help us carry this burden. Our small group met (for the second time) to help plan the August fundraiser for Damon’s Dance. I say they met to help… they really met to plan, prepare and carry out. Will and I are nearly useless in this process. I’m not being self-condemning; we just can’t. We’re far to broken to call area businesses and ask for silent auction donations, or to ask the police and fire men to come so hoards of kids can play with their cool stuff, or to organize a petting zoo, or get a bouncy house donated. Our family is doing this… all of it.

Tears sting my eyes as I write. Not the usual tears of pain and longing but tears of overwhelming gratitude. Children will come home because of this. This is love.

This afternoon a friend knocked on our door with a handful of restaurant gift certificates. He had spent his day, in and out of the heat, choosing to forgo a million pressing responsibilities to ask manager after manager ‘would you please donate to our cause?’ because it has become their cause. This is love.

Something struck me recently about a familiar scripture. In Ephesians 3 Paul says:

I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

I want to shout AMEN!!

As always, God’s Word is so multidimensional. Most single verses could teach a million different things. His Word is alive and active (Heb 4). But what keeps jumping out at me about this one (that He puts in front of me almost daily) is a phrase I had most often barely noticed: together with all the Lord’s holy people.

Jesus told us bluntly that we’re all about the love. Love God, love people… that’s what it’s all about (Matt 22:37-39).

Paul told us that without love nothing else matters (1 Cor 13).

But here’s what I think… we can’t do it or experience it without each other. In Ephesians Paul is hammering the power of God and in the middle of his breathless description of God’s power he prays that we may have the power together… to grasp the love of Christ.

It’s not something we do alone. This is love.

I love you guys.