I knew Jesus most of my life, but I didn't fall in love with him until that night as I was lay on the bathroom floor.
So went the story of one of the young women who is a part of a writer's group that I facilitate at Hope College. She told two stories from the bathroom floor. One was when she was making bad decisions in high school and was vomiting up the alcohol she had been drinking. The other was of a night at college when she broke up with a boyfriend and was emotionally crushed, overwhelmed and vomiting her pain, disappointment, and confusion.
There are lots of places and times we perceive would be good places to run into the arms of Jesus, but heaving into a toilet on the bathroom floor is normally not one of them, and yet...She felt God's love in the arms and words of friends who reached out to her. She felt God's assurance and presence and love as she "Sobbed her insides out." And in that place she went from knowing about Jesus to falling in love with Jesus.
Here was a Jesus who loved her in the midst of her messiness. Here was a Jesus who embraced her in her smellyness. And she couldn't help but fall in love with such a love.
So went the story of one of the young women who is a part of a writer's group that I facilitate at Hope College. She told two stories from the bathroom floor. One was when she was making bad decisions in high school and was vomiting up the alcohol she had been drinking. The other was of a night at college when she broke up with a boyfriend and was emotionally crushed, overwhelmed and vomiting her pain, disappointment, and confusion.
There are lots of places and times we perceive would be good places to run into the arms of Jesus, but heaving into a toilet on the bathroom floor is normally not one of them, and yet...She felt God's love in the arms and words of friends who reached out to her. She felt God's assurance and presence and love as she "Sobbed her insides out." And in that place she went from knowing about Jesus to falling in love with Jesus.
Here was a Jesus who loved her in the midst of her messiness. Here was a Jesus who embraced her in her smellyness. And she couldn't help but fall in love with such a love.
O the deep, deep love of Jesus, vast, unmeasured, boundless, free!
Rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me!
Underneath me, all around me, is the current of Thy love
Leading onward, leading homeward to Thy glorious rest above!
Rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me!
Underneath me, all around me, is the current of Thy love
Leading onward, leading homeward to Thy glorious rest above!
S. Trevor Francis 1875
So when was a time in your life when you went from knowing about Jesus...from believing in Jesus... to falling in love with Jesus? When did you realize that Jesus was in love with you? And I pray that for all of us it happens over and over again. Sometimes in the midst of our messiness, but sometimes when we are overwhelmed by creation, or flooded with the warmth of friendship, or caught up in the glory of pure worship.
I realized it once again when I sat in that room with a group of college young women who shared their stories of life, and growth, and fear, and faith, and God working in all manner of ways to call them into a life lived for God's glory. I was blessed.
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