Love I Just Can't Acquire - Daughters of Promise - February 10

LOVE I JUST CAN’T ACQUIRE

I will praise you as long as I live and in your name I will lift up my hands.  I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods;with singing lips my mouth will praise you.  Psalm 63:4-5

Of all the things I could pray for regarding each of you today, feeling satisfied in God would be at the top of the list.  Some of you are selling your souls to get the love you want.  You prostrate yourself, promise things you have no right promising, all for the prospect of someone's affection.  Others of you are saying goodbye to an aging parent and you're realizing the window of time is short for getting the love you've always craved.  Perhaps all your efforts, day and night, are trying to figure out how to turn their heart toward you.

Oh, how we yearn to belong, to be under the care of someone trustworthy.  We dream of sitting in their shade, satiated and content.

God promises all that and more.  He's calling us to lose our souls to Him and call His Son "Master."  He knows that if we willingly give up our life, we will find it.  A soul who abdicates his right to a self-proclaimed identity and then blends into Jesus only finds that his true self emerges.  We are meant to be united to Christ, meant to live in total and complete unity with Him.

The beloved John spoke of the barrier to love.  It is fear.  If I open up my heart completely, no secrets, to someone as big as God, and then He rejects me, I will find it unbearable.  To play it safe, I open up my mind to the thought of His love while I seal away my heart in order to protect it.  God wants my heart.  Our relationship wilts without a mutual heartfelt affection.  I'm not alive to God without a complete heart investment.

To open myself up completely takes faith.  I must believe Him when God tells me what He is like.  I must also believe Him when He tells me the truth of what I'm worth to Him.  Even prodigals can go limping home with confidence.  If I allow the Master to pour on His love without restriction, it will fill me up and splash over onto the very people upon whom I've been waiting to love me!  That's the irony and the miracle.

It took years, Lord, but I'm not afraid anymore.  Amen

For more from Christine Wyrtzen and Jaime Wyrtzen Lauze, please visit www.daughtersofpromise.org