Until I’m alive to your love once again.
Sometimes we take for granted the things we cherish most. We live with such jam-packed schedules that the time and energy needed to nurture our greatest treasures are often relegated to the margins of our calendars. Such is true of our families, friends, and even our relationship with Christ.
As Christians, we know the most important thing in life is God’s love. This is fundamental to the very fabric of our faith. We first surrendered our lives to Christ not because we were won by an argument but because our hearts finally woke up. But since then, something happened—we’ve lost touch with his life-changing love.
We live in a culture of distraction ever demanding our time and resources. We’ve become so accustomed to our diversions we rarely recognize the toll it takes. It isn’t enough just to know about and appreciate God’s love, we must daily respond to it if we hope to keep its fire aflame in our hearts. These responses take time and energy … resources only available to those freed from the pull of their distractions. Unfortunately, such freedom rarely comes without suffering.
Suffering has a way of peeling us down to basics and reorienting our perspective on what matters most. It has a way of halting us in our tracks and forcing us to face the condition of our faith. Gone are the distractions that for so long kept us from seriously dealing with the degree of our love for God. In this place of sorrow we finally face up to what has filled our hearts. We simply know if we have settled for lesser affections than the wonder of Christ in us, the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27).
Somehow, suffering helps us know if it is time for our hearts to come alive to God once again. While the reasons for such lost love vary from person to person, distraction is almost always the cause. Bit by bit, we’ve allowed other things to slowly steal the time and energy previously reserved for the nurturing of our inner life.
It no longer matters how we arrived at such a state. The question simply becomes—“What are we going to do about it?” At the end of the day, there is really only one response—surrender. We intentionally give back to God what we’ve slowly relinquished to others … our love.
It is here in the place of broken surrender where our hearts finally beat once again. In a knowing beyond words, his love speaks … and everything is different. The loss we feared is suddenly overwhelmed by the new life he gives. Next week we consider the implications of a heart surrendered to God.
What Do You Think?
What do you think it means to say that through suffering, God can cause our hearts to come alive once again?
♦ To see the video and poem this post is based on, click here.
