Thirty-Five

 I often feel like I don't need my ipod because sometimes my head feels like one with all the songs that seem to play in it (however, I plan to keep my ipod since I usually only get certain parts of songs suck in my head).  Sometimes I get songs stuck in my head that truly annoy me (like the time I had the theme song from Doug playing my head for a month) and others times I get songs stuck in my head that I know shouldn't be there (oh Lady Gaga haha - that's a confession right there haha).  But today I had one stuck in my head that I was thankful.  One I needed to be reminded of.

How Me Loves*

The majority of the song goes Oh how He loves us...Oh how He loves us...Oh how He loves us...How He Loves...

It's amazing to sing out to realize that God is passionately in love with us.  He is the perfect Lover.  He acts in mighty ways to show His glory but He also acts to reveal to us His love.  His love is one that can't be comprehended.  Understood.  It's one that's undeserved.  But it's relentless and overwhelming.  And when I sing the chorus of this song I am always amazed by the love of Christ.  The lengths Christ has gone to show me His love.

But today the part of the song stuck in my head wasn't the chorus...it was just the first few lines.

He is jealous for me
loves like a hurricane, I am a tree,
Bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy.

The Creator of the universe.  The one who hung the stars.  The one who can choose all riches.  He could have chosen anything else...anyone else.  But He choses to love us.  He is so jealous for us.  And being jealous for us will cause Him to go to any great length to show us this love.  He will go as far it takes to us show us His love.  He left the beauty of heaven and moved into our neighborhood and into our mess.  He left all glories and riches and became poor and lowly.  He left all comforts and allowed Himself to be laid to rest in the place where cows and donkeys ate from.** He left a place where pain and tears did not exist in order to bear pain of all.  He gave up perfection to take on my sin and yours.  He left it and He gave it all up.  For me.  For you.  He's that jealous for us.  Jealous that He will allow nothing to keep Him away from us.  He wants us.  He doesn't need us.  He wants us.  He loves us.

And maybe it's because I'm from Florida but I love the line "loves like a hurricane, I am a tree, bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy."  

One of my earliest, most vivid memories is a hurricane.  I remember the day Hurricane Andrew hit almost as if it was yesterday and I was four when it ravaged through Miami.  I remember the unexpectedness of this storm.  While now days they're tracked for weeks and days before hitting, Andrew wasn't supposed to hit us.  No one thought it was coming.  We went to the zoon the day before it hit.  And when we got home the forecast had changed.  Andrew was coming and we better get ready.  I remember my mom throwing me in the car and rushing us to our neighborhood Publix to gather water, batteries, and other items you should be stocked up on in case of a hurricane.  I remember getting there and man rushing to our car telling us this Publix was sold out and we should head to the one about 5 miles south.  I remember being tucked into bed just to be woken up a few hours later to wait out the worst of the storm in the hallway.  But the memory of this storm that is the most vivid is the morning after.  When Andrew had passed and the sun rose, we all stepped outside.  Before we could even get to the front door, we noticed the living room wasn't the same as when we had gone to sleep the night before.  What had been on the one side was now on the other.  Pictures and books were wet and chairs almost ruined because our front picture had shattered.  Glass from the window and quite a few tree branches lay on our tile.  In the frontyard and in the backyard trees were completely uprooted.  Branches broken.  Pieces of neighbors' windows and roofs spread out over our grass.  There was a river where our road had once been.  Nothing looked the same as it had the night before.  Everything had changed in the course of just a few hours.

And that's how God's love is...it's like a hurricane not because it's destructive but because it is so powerful and overwhelming that you can't experience His love and be left unchanged.  You can't go through a hurricane like Andrew was and expect nothing to be different the next morning.  It's the same for His love.  You can't expect to experience it and encounter it without there being difference.  Trees bend in hurricanes...in God's love we bend and are molded.  But after a hurricane (unless the tree was uprooted) it always grows again...in God's love we'll grow.

So today I once again find myself in awe and eternally thankful for the love of Christ.  That His jealousy for us will cause Him to go any length to reach us and His love is so powerful that it absolutely leaves us changed.



*I'm partial to the John Mark McMillan version because he's my favorite singer, but I do have the David Crowder version and the Kim Walker rendition on my ipod, and highly recommend all three because the song is so powerful and so true and so utterly amazing :)


**This is kind of a side note and slightly off topic but I had this revelation this week.  I always knew the manger was where the animals ate from but I got to thinking about when my brother Ian raised cows how absolutely disgusting the place where they ate from was.  I mean animals do not have good manners and they slobber and tend to spit up their food and leave in with their other food. It's gross.  So think about how much He must love us to be willing to sleep in it.