And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is.

Ephesians 3:18 (Passion Translation)

To Be Loved – Part 6

Go to  PART 1  |  PART 2  |  PART 3  |  PART 4  |  PART 5

Here’s the thing about my tiny house. All that time I spent worrying it was not big enough, grand enough, designer enough (is that how you say that?), clean enough… was time that I missed seeing the love that fills it, dwells in it and flows out of it. What my house contains is far greater than its walls and floors and doors. You could look at it from the street and see a small white beach shack on a corner block with a trampoline in the back yard, lawns that need tending and a broken gutter hanging on the side. And you’d be right… yet is so much more than that.

It’s a royal castle, a dream factory, a meeting place, a memory maker, a hospital, a counselor's office, a romantic restaurant, a lover's lookout, a dance floor, a place where a brave ninja battles evil and a princess extends her kindness (my kids…). It’s the place where I’ve cried with my friends and fought with my husband; where my newborn slept her first night on earth and my son left for his first day of school; it’s where I've fallen in love every day with an incredible man and talked of our dreams and plans for the future. It's a wondrous and magical place where anything is possible and love is as thick and as real and as the green grass in our back yard.

And you wouldn't know this unless you came inside and saw for yourself. Unless you knocked on my door and I opened it and invited you in.

The power to understand the love of God is to show up right in the middle of it with all your life in tow. In the triune relationship of self, God and others you begin to see the depths and the heights of his love and grace. It's found in the exchange. It’s not the exterior of our lives that count; what they look like and what people think of them. It's in the interiors that meaning takes place. Beneath the surface… not just observing, but involved. Humble, vulnerable, open.

To be loved by God is to love yourself and to love yourself and to love God is to love others. And that is a holy and sacred space.

Let's stop rejecting and judging and condemning… and instead open the doors of our hearts and homes to God and others, be real and present and vulnerable. Love and be loved. Maybe while loving people right in the middle of their lives, we’ll discover a way to move forward. Step by step, day by day… figuring it out as we go.

How else will we discover the depths of God's love unless we go in scary deep?

In closing, a word from Frederick Buechner,

“We are above all things loved – that is the good news of the gospel – and loved not just the way we turn up on Sundays in our best clothes and on our best behavior and with our best feet forward, but loved as we alone know ourselves to be, the weakest and shabbiest of what we are along with the strongest and gladdest. To come together as people who believe that just maybe this gospel is actually true should be to come together like people who have just won the Irish Sweepstakes. It should have us throwing our arms around each other like people who have just discovered that every single man and woman in those pews is not just another familiar or unfamiliar face but is our long-lost brother and our long-lost sister because despite the fact that we have all walked in different gardens and knelt at different graves, we have all, humanly speaking, come from the same place and are heading out into the same blessed mystery that awaits us all. This is the joy that is so apt to be missing, and missing not just from church but from our own lives – the joy of not just managing to believe at least part of the time that it is true that life is holy, but of actually running into that holiness head-on.”

[vcex_image_grid columns=”3″ pagination=”false” thumbnail_link=”custom_link” link_title_tag=”true” custom_links_target=”_blank” overlay_style=”title-category-visible” columns_gap=”5″ img_hover_style=”fade-out” image_ids=”20934,20935,20937″ custom_links=”https://itunes.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1239768002?pt=118656308&ct=blog%20footer&mt=8,https://www.pktfuel.com/dailyemail,https://www.pktfuel.com/support” img_height=”350″]