Wrecked

I cry a lot these days.

It’s something like, say if you were promised $100 million if you complete a certain, not-totally-easy journey. When you get there you find that you have been led to Smaug’s lair (from Lord of the Rings).

But there is no Smaug and no competition. It is yours for the taking, and it’s $100 million per cubic foot. It’s a pile of gold miles wide and you can’t tell where the bottom of the pile is.

You are weary from the journey and your emotions are frazzled. So when you get there and see what you have discovered it’s more than you can wrap your mind around and you just lose it. You are already fragile and you just start weeping. Then the next day you are no better off. The more it hits you the more wrecked you get. Someone says, “Hey, nice jeans,” and you just lose it all over again.

This is my experience of the love of God today.

I am not weeping because I wish I was loved. I’m weeping because I am discovering that I already am loved, and how ridiculously, preposterously, wastefully out of proportion the love of God is for me.

If this makes no sense, maybe think of it like this. You and I are both five years old. Our families are meeting at the beach this week and it’s a two day drive. Both of us are asking our folks all the way there, “Are we there yet?? How much longer? I wanna get out.” My family pulls in half an hour before yours and I’m talking to you on my mom’s phone, trying to describe it to you. No five year old can describe the ocean, how big it is and how much playing we can do can here, nor could a five year old understand it even if it were explained perfectly. But it’s right there around the corner.

If you are one of God’s children, if Jesus is your treasure, not Allah or Buddha or self, you are very close to the ocean. If you haven’t surrendered yourself to Jesus, asked him to save you from your brokenness and forgive you for your sins, the beach is still very close. But you must surrender first.