Like a Box of Rocks.

Ok, so I've been doing these devotionals right after school, in the quiet time before anyone else gets home, and today I seriously could not get my head around this reflection passage. Maybe I was just wiped out and stressed from school, but I couldn't find any real discernible message to take away from it. I prayed, I napped, I went about my day always with that image at the back of my mind - looking up at the cross, being intimidated and scared and unable to adequately express myself. It just wasn't clicking with me.

So I checked the blog tonight, and read a few posts (Stephanie, Pearl, Emily), and it hit me, like a box of rocks, why I wasn't getting it: I just couldn't believe how illogical it all appeared to be! But what you guys have pointed out to me, and what I'm feeling in overwhelming abundance right now, is that that's exactly why this love is so beautiful! It wouldn't be nearly as special or meaningful or, to use an extremely appropriate word, incredible if God loved us and died for us for the sake of logic; that would be something akin to a marriage of convenience, something cold and calculated and unfeeling.

This love that we receive and share and attempt to reciprocate is something so much more than that!! It's a love for love's sake, forged out of the beauty of our Savior's grace and enacted through the blood of Christ. The God of everything, the Creator, Redeemer, and Savior, the wrathful, jealous, eternal, almighty Master of the Universe loves us! He was flogged and humiliated and crucified before us by people He came to save, people He could have smote on the spot, all to demonstrate to us that God is deeply, passionately, perfectly in love with each and every one of us in a completely unique and intensely personal way, regardless of what we do or how we feel about Him!