I literally fell down. After saying goodbye about five times and inching towards the door, one of my preschool students ran up to hug me. I was trying to leave, but one blink later a stampede of kids swarmed around and embraced me tightly. They squeezed me so tight that my knees eventually buckled.
All of the kids continued to hug me as I was lying on the floor and wouldn’t let me up. They were relentless and simply didn’t want me to leave. Sometime in-between regaining my strength to get up and saying my final goodbye, I began to see that the love these kids have for me is a faint echo of the overwhelming love God has for each of us.
He loves us for who we are—
I think one of the biggest misconceptions we have is that we think we need to “clean up our act” before we go to God. I felt distant from God for so many years because I felt unworthy of love. After all I had done I didn’t believe I deserved it. The crazy thing is-He doesn’t just accept our brokenness, He embraces it. He meet us where we are and then transforms us from the inside out.
His love is limitless—
God’s love for each one of us is so much more than we are able to understand, but that doesn’t mean we should limit Him to what we can comprehend. We can’t nullify God because of our inability to grasp His greatness.
His love is fierce—
I still struggle to understand the fact that God allowed His own son to be killed so that I could come to know Him. The more I soak in this truth, the more I realize that He doesn’t call us to simply go to church and believe in Him. He commands us to lay down our own life and give Him control over everything-our relationships, finances, jobs, time, and future. He wants us to surrender the things we want take into our own hands so we don’t have to worry.
His love is relentless—
No matter how much I’ve strayed, God continually drew me back to Him. I was walking down the path that I had so carefully planned, but He didn’t hesitate to shatter my plans so that I would encounter the joy and hope that I now have.
I’m sure most of you have heard these truths before, but I really don’t want you to miss this. I don’t want you to just believe that God loves you. I hope with every bone in my body that each of you are able to, “grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:18). I want each of you encounter this unconditional, limitless, fierce, and relentless love—the kind of love that will knock you right off your feet.
