Expanded Hearts And New Seasons.
All it took was a phone call.
Ben rang at 4.02 pm on Monday. The call lasted one minute. A boy. Born at 3.01pm. Elijah Gary Loef. 7 pound 3 oz. 52 cm long. Mother and baby well.
We exchanged a few words more, and then Ben had more phone calls to make.
I’d pulled to the side of the road to take the call.
And, as I prepared to drive away, something happened that I’d never experienced before.
I felt my heart, my love and affection, expand and grow larger.
I knew in that instant, quite certainly, that there was a human being who I’d never met, but whom I was quite certain that I loved.
That’s never happened to me exactly like that before.
Sometimes love has grown. It flows from meeting and getting to know someone and having your hearts knit together.
Other times love has instantly met the object of its affection. I’ve been present for the birth of my children, heard their first cries, and the object of new love was right before me.
But this time it was different. Rather than the relationship preceding love, or the relationship and love beginning together, for three hours on Monday night love preceded the relationship.
That capacity in humans must be an aspect of what we call the image of God. To have the love without having yet encountered love’s object reminds me of the love which God always had for His people, for us, before we even existed.
God first loved us, we read, and the beginning of that love is not marked by our first meeting God, or by our birth, or by our conception. That love has always fully existed as part of God’s nature.
Our frail hearts grow and expand into love. Thank God we are not limited to the ability to love with which we are born, or that of our early years.
Little Elijah will learn to return his parents love, and his heart will grow to love them, and others, and, we trust and pray, he’ll love God through knowing the redeeming love of Jesus.
But the love of God has never grown, it has always eternally and consistently been there.
That love is united with God’s perfect will, by which all of creation, and each part of creation has been brought into being.
That love has been demonstrated in His sending His Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.
Three hours later I met Elijah Loef for the first time and my affection finally beheld its object.
Margaret and I rejoice in Ben and Kathryn expanding our hearts, and our family, even as they start their own.
For us it’s another new season, one in which our hearts will expand through the lives of those we love.
But we’re blessed in that the God, whose heart is beyond expansion, whose love is infinite, has from before all time purposed to lavish that love on us.
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