Good morning…
From all the loving texts and emails I have received since our first grandchild, Charlie, was born, one word of encouragement lingers.
“How does the saying go?” a friend wrote. “There is nothing like a newborn to remind us that God has not given up on the human race. Charlie is the sweetest reminder. These are the sweetest days. So glad they live close by so you can soak them up.”
Trusting that God has not given up on us, I now turn to page 16 of The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming, and I soak up these words written by Henri Nouwen.
“For many years I tried to get a glimpse of God by looking carefully at the varieties of human experience: loneliness and love, sorrow and joy, resentment and gratitude, war and peace. I sought to understand the ups and downs of the human soul, to discern there a hunger and thirst that only God whose name is Love could satisfy. I tried to discover the lasting beyond the passing, the eternal beyond the temporal, the perfect love beyond all paralyzing fears, and the divine consolation beyond the desolation of human anguish and agony. I tried constantly to point beyond the moral quality of our existence to a presence larger, deeper, wider, and more beautiful than we can imagine, and to speak about that presence as a presence that can already now be seen, heard, and touched by those who are willing to believe.”
And I pray that Christ will be more and more at home in your hearts, living within you as you trust in him. May your roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love; and may you be able to feel and understand, as all God’s children should, how long, how wide, how deep, and how high his love really is; and to experience this love for yourselves, though it is so great that you will never see the end of it or fully know or understand it. And so at last you will be filled up with God himself (Ephesians 3:17-19, TLB).
Admiring Charlie’s perfect little toes makes me more willing to believe that God has not given up on the human race, makes me more willing to trust that, already now, we are being filled up with God himself.
…Sue…
