Love beyond reason

St. Paul, was someone who studied and wrote deeply on the vast implications of the cross where Jesus became our substitute. Someone who’d looked intensely into the incongruity of how sinners could ever be inexhaustibly loved by a holy God. Someone who’d plumbed the depths of how much it cost God to express his heart for us in giving up his only son, and marveled how long this love would last. Someone who’d had his soul shaken at every discovery. This Apostle who was normally so precise in his writing—when struggling to communicate this love in this week’s Epistle reading—could only muster vague(ish) talk about dimensions... “the breadth and length and height and depth” of God’s love for us.

But this is the very kind of love the human heart craves. We all want to be swept away, to be loved in spite of ourselves, to be fully accepted, to be cherished, to really matter to someone. We want to be caught up in someone’s arms when we fall, we want someone to watch over us, to be enraptured in the lavish love of someone who knows all our brokenness yet will never turn away. We want to experience love beyond reason.