I Am Loved

I have loved you with an everlasting love.

—Jeremiah 31:3

A glance at the old digital clock made me want to scream.

5:50 a.m.

On a Saturday. For the love.

Can’t a girl catch a break? You should know I’m a hardcore morning person. Most days I’m up no later than 6:00 a.m. In a house filled with children who seldom stop moving or talking, it’s my only real shot at peace and quiet.

Feel free to shout amen. Or send espresso.

But it was the weekend, and I needed a break. For two weeks I’d poured myself into loving my family. Meal preparation, homework, endless errands and grocery shopping, and four always-talking, always-moving children.

Like a blistering stretch of heat-filled days, exhaustion had turned me dry and brittle. I desperately needed sleep, extra quiet minutes snuggled under the sheets, time to rest, and space to breathe. I needed someone to fill up the love I’d been pouring out.

It was not to be. I was awake, no matter how much I didn’t want to be. With a groan, I slid from the sheets, careful not to wake my snoring spouse. In silence, I dressed, closed the bedroom door, and made my way downstairs.

I paused in the foyer, next to the double French doors leading into my office. I had work to do, always more work to do. A never-ending pile of to-do’s pulled me to my desk. But in spite of my never-assuaged guilt, I knew I had nothing left to give.

So I grabbed coffee, journal, and Bible and seated myself outside.

For more than thirty minutes I just sat and stared at the dark gray morning sky. Too weary to do anything else.

God, I need you. I’m empty.

It happened so fast I would have missed it had I stepped inside for a coffee refill. One moment the sky appeared shades of purple, the next moment as if someone had struck a match and set the sky on fire in hues of pink and orange. Though the temperature remained chilly, I felt heat, as if the sun’s reflection off the clouds were a fireplace burning in the morning sky.

Like a message meant for me, a jumble of familiar words filled my mind, warming my soul as the sun showed off:

For with the LORD is unfailing love.

Unfailing love. The kind that doesn’t give out. The kind that isn’t reluctant to embrace my empty self. The kind that can fill a bankrupt mama with enough to get her through another day.

The sunrise almost over, another message came to mind.

Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed.

I soaked up those words like the sun’s warming rays in the cool of morning.

For the two weeks prior, I’d felt consumed. Consumed by responsibility. Consumed by weariness. Consumed by this never-slowing life that requires more from me than I can give. Sometimes being a wife, mom, and business owner isn’t what I dreamed it to be. It involves far more giving than receiving, far more loving than being loved. If I hired an accountant to keep tabs on my heart, he’d find me in the red more often than not. I can see it in the dark circles under my eyes and hear it in my oft-curt replies.

But as I watched the sun take its place in the sky, as I savored the unexpected gift of an ordinary morning, I realized something: it isn’t lazy Saturday mornings that sustain me; it’s God’s incomparable, unfailing love. A love He delights to deliver through an unexpected Saturday morning sunrise.

Within minutes of the sunrise’s end, I found the connection between these two seemingly random Bible passages that God had so clearly brought to mind. I found it in the words “unfailing love” (Ps. 130:7) and “great love” (Lam. 3:24). With a quick word study I discovered them to be the same Hebrew word: hesed.

One of the most important words of the entire Old Testament. A word that means “love, kindness, mercy.” It’s a kindness “reserved for close friends and family members . . . An act of hesed presupposed the existence of a relationship between the parties involved, but where no formal relationship has previously been recognized, the person exercising hesed has chosen to treat the recipient as if such a relationship did exist.”*

Did you get that? Hesed—God’s hesed—is not dependent on us. It’s not about doing more or being more. It’s not about sleeping in or waking early, working in the wee hours or journaling on the deck. I could’ve slept in rather than read the Psalms, and God’s love for me wouldn’t have been any greater.

Firm, steadfast, unfailing . . . mercy, kindness, and love.

Hesed.

It’s not about us; it’s about Him. And we are loved.

We can be humble only when we know that we are God’s children, of infinite value, and eternally loved.

—MADELEINE L’ENGLE, WALKING ON WATER