Do you know what gets me? My four-year-old’s big brown eyes and my one-year-old boy’s little lips when he purses them together to make a whistle sound. Then there are those deep-belly laughs that make them two roll over on the floor with drool stringing from their mouths. And now that Micah gets older, how he expresses his need for love and to love captures my heart like a clear blue sky does a sparrow.
With those boys of mine, I sometimes feel so overwhelmed with love for them it hurts. I’m sure Micah thinks I’m crazy at times when I grab him and his brother and let out a yell as I squeeze them tight. Recently, Micah has created a competition out of explaining his love for me and Britton. He will say, “I love you more and more and more and more…” and the mores go on until his big brown eyes are bulging. Of course, I always win because I just say, “I love you that much and even more! I love you all the way to the moon.” But he fights back saying, “Well, I love you all the way to Mars.” To which I reply, “I love you all the way to Pluto and back again.” What got me again the other night was when I was praying with Micah and thanking God for loving us so much. When I finished, Micah said, “Well, tell God that I love Him more and more and more…” With joy and wonder in my heart, I replied, “But, you know that God loves you even more than that! There’s no way to measure it because it’s way past Pluto.”
Ephesians 3:16-18 says, “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 Lord’s holy people, 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.”
As a parent, my own love for my children astounds me, but I know that, because I am not God, my love is finite. Perhaps it does stretch all the way to Pluto and back again, but it is nothing compared to how much Christ loves my children or how much Christ loves me. As a parent, I seek to show my children how much I love them by explaining it in a way that would blow their little minds and warm their hearts. “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8).
Christ, who was with God in the beginning, who is God’s son and rightly claims to be God in the flesh, sacrificed Himself for you and me. That love goes beyond the Milky Way racing past the trillions of stars reaching beyond unknown galaxies, stretching across the expanses of the universe that is ever-expanding in all directions. The more we get to know who Christ is, the more we understand the depth and pain of His sacrifice. That love crushes us with its weight but yet sustains us with its power. It is perfectly unfathomable. But, oh that we would delight in trying.