Love Multiplied

It is amazing how God can and does use everything and anything to teach us.  Some of the deepest lies I wrestle with have to do with my self worth and if God chooses to love me or just does it because His word says that he does.  As you know I spend most of my days with about 35 kids.  Like any kid each of them has their good days and their bad days, but I love each of them so dearly even on the worst days.  It recently occurred to me that I think I always believed that there is a limit to a person's capacity to love.  Like there is only so much love that can flow out of a person and eventually it becomes diluted as they try and love more people.  It's like saying that my parents only love me one fourth as much as they loved my brother when he was born because I am the fourth born and so their love has become divided amongst the four of us.  I couldn't be more wrong.  As I get to know each of my kids here more and more, spend more time with them, see them through their good and bad, my love does not divide, but it multiplies.

As I used to think about God's love for me I think I supposed that his love for me was miniscule because it was divided amongst so many people.  Like i only have a billionth of a fraction of His love, because he only has so much love to give and so he has to spread it thin.  In Romans 5:5 however it says, "And hope does not put to shame, because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us."  God doesn't give us each one drop, he has "poured" himself out as a sacrifice.  He is an overflowing well of love in each one of his children.  I don't get a fraction of his love, I get all of it all the time.  There is a line in a song that says, "If his grace is an ocean, we're all sinking."  I absolutely love this thought.  I love swimming in the ocean and I love the feeling of being out above my head and just going with the ebs and flows of the great mass of water that is the ocean.  Imagine that the ocean is just all love and you are the only person in it.  You can't possibly even begin to comprehend how vast, how wide, how deep, and how glorious it is.  That is how God loves us.  

I think about the way I love my kids and how I didn't know my heart could be so full, or hurt so deeply for another person, but one thing I do know now is that if God's love is dwelling within me there is no limit to how much of it can flow out of me.

I have recently been on a C.S. Lewis kick.  I listened to the entire Chronicles of Narnia series and then read another three of his books that I brought with me from home.  In A Grief Observed his step son writes the introduction and when I first read this line it brought me to tears: "I had yet to learn that all human relationships end in pain--it is the price that our imperfection has allowed Satan to exact from us for the privilege of love." -Douglas H. Gresham.  The fact that all human relationships end in pain is something we do not often think about, or like to admit, but it is the truth.  Either a disagreement drives a wedge, or someone dies and the remaining party is left in the indescribable agony that Lewis writes about in this book.  I think what struck me more that the sadness of that statement is that not for a second does it seem any less worth it to me.  I think about my kids and how I worry about them every second they are not in my care, and some might say that it would be better to not get attached because eventually I will leave, they will leave, or something bad will indeed happen.  However, isn't that the truth in all relationships?  Are we to say of our children that it would be better not to love them so much because they are bound to disobey, or disappoint, or hurt you in some way?  The argument is null because the love is worth the end pain.  I would rather risk the pain and hurt of a relationship for the glory that are the moments of love and joy and friendship.

Love does not divide, it only multiplies.  Take a risk today and love recklessly.

Standing in awe of how loved I am,

Sigourney