This past week on Friday surrounded by all of my students at school talking about the boyfriends and girlfriends and how much they love them had me smiling all day. The students were so cute dressed up and walking around with their huge teddy bears and flowers they had bought for their significant others, many of them their first “loves.” I then began to think of my students that maybe did not receive anything on this holiday where we celebrate the love we have for those in our lives and it got me thinking about an even bigger topic a much BIGGER TOPIC…
What about the people who walk this earth that don’t know the love of God…I think of my own life and what it would look like to live my entire life never knowing that God loved me or that there even was a God. It is almost impossible for me to think, while so very true, that there are people in my neighborhood, next door in the apartment complex I live in who don’t know the love of God. There are people who walk this Earth in search of anything or anyone to try and fulfill and satisfy a place in their hearts that only God can fill…but if they have never heard of God or heard of the love that God has for them how will they ever know that that is what they need in their lives?
I think of the love that God has shown to me in the past 22 years of my life. The unconditional, never ending, never changing love that He has poured out on me time and time again …to think that God sent His only Son to die for ME…for YOU…for THE WORLD. Yet so often we forget that this was the biggest demonstration of love…LOVE that we cannot nor will we ever be able to understand.
In thinking of this love that God has for me I’m reminded of the day I knew the Lord was changing my heart and breaking my heart for what breaks His heart. It was my first week in Botswana and I had become very close with a little orphaned girl named Charity who the Lord was using to change so much of my life. Charity, this sweet little girl, was telling me goodbye and I whispered in here ear that Jesus loved her and kissed her on the cheek. She began giggling as I did it and she would not stop laughing with this confused look on her face. There was a young college student with us who I quickly asked why Charity was reacting the way that she was when I kissed her cheek. The young college student spoke with Charity who then told me that Charity had not ever been kissed on her cheek. I can’t even begin to count the number of times my momma, dad, and all my family members kissed me on the cheek yet this sweet precious little girl was not kissed on her cheek, did not have someone to hold her or kiss her or tell her how loved she was.
While to me kissing a young child that I cared for on the cheek seemed completely normal this was something she had never experienced before…and I thought to myself if I could remember the first time I knew that God loved me and what it must feel like for people when they finally experience and know God’s love for the first time in their lives.
All of this talk of Valentine’s Day and thinking of God’s love for me and for the world made me realize that for those of us who know God, who experience His love on a daily basis…we have the ability to share that with people who have never experienced the love of God through Jesus Christ. God has given us His love not only for us, but for us to have a heart so full that it feels like it could burst if we don’t share this love with others.
I’ve realized this is why I want to go and serve on the World Race because God’s love is so strong and evident in my life that I must GO and love the nations, hoping that they will feel the way Charity did when I first kissed her on the cheek, a confusing overwhelming, exciting, heart changing feeling when they first experience the love of God in their life! I pray that you would recall the way you have felt God’s love in your own life and step out and pour that love into someone else’s life because they may have never experienced His love and God may be calling you to share this never ending love with them for the first time!
“A deep deep flood, an Ocean flows from You
Of deep deep love, yeah it’s filling up the room
Your innocent blood, has washed my guilty life
In Your presence God I’m completely satisfied.”–Divine Romance Phil Wickham
Remember God’s love is like a deep, deep flood filling up every part of the Earth and every part of you! God wants to pour out His love on us and use us to pour that love out to others.
