Oh How He Loves

I wish I better understood love.

The love that the Father has lavished on us.

Both the violent love who's glorious power can sweep across nations and bring them to their knees by the sheer majesty of it and the quiet love that moves so tenderly upon a fragile heart.

The love that understands all heartache and misery because it has felt it over and over again.

The love that makes one vulnerable, the love that puts it all on the line, holding nothing back.

Unselfish.

The love that is not only emanated from the one true God, but that is one with Him. The love that has to be expressed through His every move, breath, and step for the entirety of its purest form is found in the fullness of His eyes.

God is Love is God is Love is God is Love is God is Love is GOD.

1 John 4:8.

Love that wrenches fear from its self-imposed throne and casts it down to its miserable companions to cower in the presence of true Beauty and Holiness, effacing any remnants of its life-leaching qualities by simply pouring forth in a glorious, unbridled flood.

The Love that defies all of man's feeble attempts to capture, analyze and misconstrue the magnitude of its influence; that cannot be dissected, pinned down, tamed, isolated, or trained.

It is NOT tame.

But it is good.

The perfect Love that sees me in my own blood, filth, and tears and deems me beautiful.

When I cry, "I am so wretched", He responds, "But you are so loved."

Wretched but SO loved.

Maybe, I actually don't want to better understand Love: not the mechanics, the explanation, or any possible root cause that we in our finite, flawed minds have deemed authoritative in a self-righteous flourish of resources, references, and reconstituted truth.

Maybe, I just want to experience His Love: letting it wrench me, bend me, kiss and caress me. A Love that no words could ever possibly hope to describe and yet one who is constantly drenched in it has no need for words: his or her eyes speak volumes.

The Love that is worth risking every trial, test, tribulation, and torture if only to experience more.

Whatever it takes, to know Love more.

"Love like a hurricane, I am tree"

Souls and Bodies

Why is it that one's soul and one's body are viewed as completely different entities?  Where, instead of responding to each other in beautiful harmony, a cacophonous power struggle rages in the innermost parts of our being.

Very rarely have I experienced someone who embodies their soul, whose every action and expression and voice inflection captures the essence of the wild, uninhibited, undiluted entity that is so often compressed, reasoned with, compromised, and manipulated to fit into the narrow confines of limited hope that we constrain ourselves to.

And yet, in my very short experience, there I have seen the most peace.

I have a beautiful friend.  Usually when we hear the word 'beautiful', aesthetics are the first thought to cross our mind.  Believe me, my friend is aesthetically beautiful in every way, but her true beauty shines from her soul.  Is it too cliche to say she glows?  For though we use such words to describe those who appropriately meet our standards for such a compliment, when compared to someone who emanates such brilliance the others simply pale in comparison.  

My friend was diagnosed with breast cancer approximately a year ago.  With this news, every part of her busy life was stripped away to the point where she had to come face to face with the product of her soul.  

No numbness.

No distractions.

Only her broken body and the rawness of her soul.

And there, when she painfully gave God both her body and her soul and He composed them into her personal, predesigned melody, she began to glow.  

Her actions embody her soul.

Her soul guides her actions.

And the peace that she has on her face every day is enrapturing.  

"And the cry of my heart is to bring You praise

From the inside out, Lord my soul cries out"

"My soul sings, my soul sings, my soul sings:

how I love You"

When we surrender our body and our soul into His hands, we can cry out to Him with every aspect of our being.  No longer is there a limitation, a wall separating our internal from our external.  No interruptions in the beautiful melody He has composed for each one of His children.  No walls incarcerating our soul or silencing its longing.

And our soul's constant desire is to cry out to its Maker.

"From the inside out"