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a seed-sized bit

i'm pretty sure i must have at least ten posts on this blog dedicated to this very idea, but after the weekend i just had, i feel the need to remind anyone who is reading this of one of the fundamental truths of my faith:

that God is deeply, wildly, uncontrollably, and recklessly in love with you. 

i don't mean that God has to love you just because of the way the universe is set up or something.  i don't mean that God loves you with some distant cosmic love. 

i mean, quite literally, that God adores you.  i mean that God chooses you.  i mean that God looks at you and rejoices in you.  that God's heart beats faster at the sight of you.  that God can't stop thinking about you.  i mean that God loves you with the kind of love that cannot be stopped by distance or by time or by death or by anything else.  from the moment that God began carefully designing you, until this very moment, God has been passionately pursuing you, calling you closer and closer.  this love is not tame.  it is not normal.  it is not manageable.  it is not trite.  it is not forced.  it is not routine. 

it is crazy.  it is relentless.  it is religious, in the best sense of the word.  it is full and wide and tall and enormous and yet focused directly on you, and every little thing about you.  it is just about unspeakable and pretty much unbelievable. 

but if we can believe it at all, even just a little bit, like a tiny seed-sized bit, it can change our whole lives, moving any obstacles in our lives, and transforming us. 

two months from today i will be preaching my final sermon at clinton united methodist church, a place where i have been preaching for nearly four years.  i have already been thinking about what my final words will be.  what will i say that will be a worthy bookend to my ministry here?  what words will encapsulate the truth i've been proclaiming for four years?  what is the fundamental truth that i believe people desperately need to hear and that i desperately need to tell? 

it's simple: God loves you.  with a love that is deeper than you can ever dream or imagine or understand, God loves you.  i pray you would come to know it, even in just a seed-sized way. 

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