Mark of an Unreasonable Entity

Yesterday I was on my way into town, P-Town that is, which is Pueblo, and I had one of those moments where you start to feel just a twinge of the enormity of who God is and what He's really done for you. Those are hard moments, really good moments, but painful. I started off thinking about love, how typically when we think of love we think of romance, hearts, roses, teddy bears, starry skies, colorful sunrises and sunsets, walks on the beach, marriage, happily ever after, all of those wonderful things. We don't often think of the other side of love. The side of love that isn't calm or peaceful or even necessarily joyful in any regard. We don't think about the dangerous side of love, the gut wrentchingly passionate side.

Love is all those great things, butterflies in the stomach, emotional fireworks, and what ever else you want to fill in the blank. But love is fierce, a force to be reckoned with. I wouldn't want to tick Love off. Love dies and kills for the object of it's affection. Love levels cities, breaks people, destroys darkness in its wake, violently uproots a mountain from it's resting spot and moves it into the middle of the sea to get where it wants to go. Love is determined, unstoppable, jealous over the object of it's affection. When that object is compromised Love rises up like a giant grizzly bear and roars in the face of adversity, and if adversity will not then flee it takes action in the most turbulent fashion. It wears it away, sometimes gently, and other times with firm resolve not to stop until justice is done. Love is a flame that once lit consumes everything in its path like a wild fire in a vast forest. Love doesn't know any boundary, it doesn't understand containment, and it's not that it can't be contained, but that it won't be contained, it refuses such a senseless idea. Love is like a lion, beautiful, and majestic, but powerful, and fierce.

I like the idea that Christ was/is a warrior. There was nothing sweet or gentle about what he did on the cross, or in his life. It was an act of war, the deciding battle that ended it all. Christ loved, but his love was fierce, and intentional. It wasn't about a romantic feeling, butterflies in the stomach and all that. Sure, it was beautiful! But he came to the world with a double edged sword to rid the world of the thing that stood in the way of his love, which would be sin, and evil in general. They say that God is Love, oh that is so true! He has leveled cities, broken people, moved mountains, he has risen up against the ones who have compromised the objects of his affection and destroyed them, he has lived, died and killed for the objects of his affection, and if there is anyone who doesn't know anything about boundaries or containment it is certainly God. He did it all for love, which can admittedly be hard to fathom. How can a God that is Love kill anything? I don't think I can logically explain that myself, but I know that for me if someone threatened what I love I would do whatever I had to get rid of that threat. Killing is always a last resort, very, very last. God was never one to just kill for the pleasure of it, not the God I know anyway. But when he ran out of options he did what he had to, hence an old, bloody cross.

It was about this time in my thought process that I started thinking about myself. I make no secret of this, I'm not a nice person naturally. I'm not a good person by any stretch of the imagination. I promise you that if you see anything good in me or who I am, it is all Christ. I am nothing, absolutely nothing. I'm prideful, extremely prideful, I am angry and violent, I curse... yes, the "good" Christian girl curses, I don't like people, they tick me off, the church makes me crazy, the body of Christ irritates the living daylights out of me and there are times I just can't stand to be a part of it. I'm not nearly as sweet as I look, that's the truth. It is through Christ alone that I have been able to maintain sanity and keep from going on a killing spree, because I, without Christ, would do that. And truthfully I think that is the case for most people, Christians in particular. If we didn't have Christ we'd go mad and kill each other. On top of all that, I am nothing compared to God. Barely even a speck of dust to him.

So this is my marvel... I know me, I know what I've done. If ever there was a wretch or a fool, it's me. Paul said that he was the least of all men, he only said that because he hadn't met me. I have been so rebellious against God, I've not only put him on hold so that I could do what I wanted to, I actually turned my back on him and walked away. And that's after I became a Christian. I'm talking about something that's happened in the last two years, I've been a Christian, truly, since I was about 13. I sinned horribly, and I continue to despite my best efforts to follow God and love him, to serve him and obey him, I continue to be human. And the thing is that I know this, but God knows all this too. He watched me turn around and walk away, openly turning my back on him and flaunting my rebellion. I practically spit in his face, and he knows it. He was there, he saw the whole thing. Despite my best efforts to make God hate me, he still loves me. Despite my disrespect and irreverence of him, he's willing to take me back in his arms, even as I beat against his chest to let me go, and hold me until my heart breaks under his love again. Until my resolve melts away and the torrents of my emotions and idiocy are stilled. And then the most remarkable thing happens, he leans his head down until his lips just barely brush my ear and in the softest whisper that only I can hear he says "I still love you, and I will never let you go."

I cannot for the life of me understand this. That on the cross Christ was bleeding and God the Father was turning his back on his son, and just as it was becoming so unbearable that he was about to give the whole thing up he saw my face and the things I would do and the person I would be and decided to stick with it anyway, because some how I'm worth loving. What is it that makes me worth dieing for? When he knows me, how does he find worth in me? Regardless of the fact that he created me. This is something I don't think I'll ever understand, I don't think I'll ever be able to fathom the logic behind it. But then again, when was Love ever logical?! When was the last time that God did something that actually made sense? What he did was seriously intense. He bore my sins, my rebellions, my anger, my hate, all the worst things of who I am as a fallen human being. He took all that upon himself for the sake of his love for me, this strange, mysterious Love. What a fool he was to do it, but he was a fool for the right thing, in the right way, which some how makes him remarkably wise. Wow... God is awesome, and that's not even a good word to describe him. It's too much to think about, what he did and how/why he did it. This is the awesomeness of God that he would create us, live and die for us, when we aren't even worth saving by any reasonable standards. Hallelujah that God is not a reasonable entity.