Love Without the Squishiness

I pulled a book off my shelf this morning as a reference for an article I was writing. It is not at all a spiritual book. In fact it is a book about how to make money.

I only bought it because I heard the author speak at a conference one time years ago. I liked his story and what he had to say. In fact I caught up with him for a second afterwards to let him know that I appreciated what he had to say and he offered to sign my book.

Being a book guy I think it is pretty cool to have the author’s signature so I gladly handed my copy over for him to scratch his name in. Instead he wrote a short, personal little note. It took him maybe 30 seconds.

I’ve had that book 10 years now. No, I’m not a millionaire. But then I haven’t really applied many of the principles he wrote about, so I can’t pretend it is the fault of the book.

Regardless, today I picked it up from my shelf to look through it and I took a closer look at his note. At the end, after he signed his name, he put a scripture reference. Now I know I’ve looked it up before but I couldn’t remember what it said. So I looked it up again this morning.

And I was blown away. Here is the passage:

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. 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 saints, 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.

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

I’ve seen that passage before, especially the second paragraph. I talked about it a couple weeks ago in this post about Big Questions from Stepping in Something Squishy.

We say those words about God being able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine every week as we head out of church.

But until this morning for some reason I never associated them with the knowledge of how totally consuming and all encompassing the Love is that Jesus has for each of us.

The Bible says that perfect love drives out fear. And I am dealing with a little bit of a fear issue as I start something new.

Perhaps God is trying tell me that I should put a little effort into understanding how much Jesus really loves me so that I can get a grip on the whole fear thing. Frankly the whole concept of “love” is one of those squishy things that I mostly don’t want to think about.

I’d honestly rather think about guy concepts like victory, conquering, overcoming, power – pretty much anything other than love. (You gotta read it with a sarcastic emphasis on the word love to get the full effect here.)

But maybe that is the basis of my fear thing I’ve got going on. Until I get over my infantile aversion to the concept of love (I can’t help the sarcasm yet. Sorry.) maybe I’ll never move forward.

So. As I go through the day today I am going to be thinking about Christ’s love for me. And I’ll work at not giggling or getting weirded out while I think about it. Because this whole fear thing is for the birds.

I’ll let you know how I do.

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