Irrevocable love…

Dearest Father in Heaven,

Thank you so incredibly much for everything; for who you are, what you’ve done, your incredible, unfailing love. Thank you so much for constantly proving who you are to me and what you can do. Thank you for loving me more than I could ever love myself. Thank you for always being there for me in ways I could never ask for.

     Your love is so dynamic and your mercies always new. Your grace comes with the morning and your beauty written on the stone of my heart.

     I love you, Lord. Because you first loved me.

     I never understood what that meant before. I always thought it was wrong to love someone just because they love you, but you proved to me that love is so much more powerful than a mere feeling.

     From youth I took my mothers words and believed every word that love is an action word. Love is physical proof of a spiritual burden to care for someone on a level that can never satiated. Love is the thing that builds up and breaks down and rearranges the very core of our beings Abba. You loved us to life. You loved us to salvation. Only the most perfect of loves can accomplish that. I see that now.

     I used to love you because my parents taught me to. I used to love simply because it had been a fact of my life since birth, that “God is good” and “God is love” and “we love Him because He first loved us” and that became an autopilot for me. I never fully understood it, but it always made sense in my heart so I followed it.

     And then I lived. I cried. I begged and bartered and learned and grew and travelled and saw and in everything I did, Lord, I saw your hand. In everything I saw I felt your blessing and love and infinite power. I saw and felt in the depths of my soul how you wrote yourself in all of existence. My chest swells at the thought of traces of your beauty weaved through our existence, into our very lives. You proved your love with the rising of the sun and the setting thereafter. You’ve proven your love by walking with me though every trial, tribulation, and sadness my heart found its way to and you loved me back to wholeness.

     God, you loved my brokenness away. You loved my fear away. You loved my regret away and with every breath I take I am reminded the life you loved me to, the life filled with gladness and friends. The life filled with proof of not only love but your existence. You’ve proven your love and power through the people you placed in my life. The incredible people you’ve given me to love and be loved by. The incredible people you buried my hope in.  

     Oh God, dearest Father in Heaven and my heart, thank you for your love. Thank you for proving your love daily why you and you alone are God, why there is no other but you. Why you and you alone hold my heart in the palm of your hand.

     I love you Lord, because you first took me from the depths of my own self-made despair and the traps I’d brought myself to. Because you took me in and cared for me and nursed me back to health. Because you called me your own before I even knew you. Because you not only loved, but gave and gave overabundantly. You gave me your peace, your love, your happiness, your strength. You gave me hope for tomorrow and constant assurance that the Blessed God I’ve come to fall deeply and irrevocably in love with is right with me, loving and caring for me in ways I could never dream of or earn.

     God, I love you because you first loved me.