The Love Of God

Two nights ago, my mom and I finished a puzzle that a friend brought us from Disney World. We all started the puzzle together, worked on it individually, worked on it with kids, didn’t work on it for awhile, and finally finished it after a week’s worth of diligent work. It’s a double-sided puzzle with images from the movie “Up” on each side. The love that Carl and Ellie share is clear in each image…

Sara Groves is my favorite. Her latest full-length album, “Abide With Me,” is a compilation of hymns, and for the past week or more I have one particular hymn stuck in my head: “The Love of God.” She didn’t write the hymn, but her arrangement has made the song accessible to me, and I absolutely adore the second verse. It reads:

“Could we with ink the ocean fill
And were the skies of parchment made
Were every tree on earth a quill
And every man a scribe by trade
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry
Nor could the scroll contain the whole
Though stretched from sky to sky”

Did you catch that? If every tree in the world were a pen and every person in the world a scribe and every ocean in the world ink and all the sky a scroll…there still wouldn’t be enough people, paper, pens, or ink to capture and contain the love of God!

In other words…
The love of God is bigger than the Carl and Ellie’s of the world,
The young couples in love and the old couples married for 50 years.
It’s bigger than
friends and family,
puzzles and laughter,
work and play,
music and poetry,
politics and religion,
sin and judgment,
gay and straight,
black and white,
race and culture,
rich and poor,
The love of God—
“How rich and pure!
How measureless and strong!
It shall forevermore endure
The saints’ and angels’ song.”

I don’t know about you…but I’m so thankful for the Love of God.

Amen?
And Amen.