Find a New Way to Love

From Gospel Translations

God is breaking into lives and giving new abilities to love. He is doing it for wives and husbands and children and single people. He is breaking people open and showing them that they are not slaves to the limits of the past. He is bursting bonds of sameness. He is opening the future for new patterns of love. He is wakening people to the astonishing reality that they can be different and better in the way they love. He is shattering the myth of fatalism. He is shocking people with the obvious, namely, that when God omnipotent indwells the soul, it is powerful. 

He is making hearts beat fast with the thought that the next 30 years might actually be different, radically different. He is revealing deep things—like the truth that before the foundation of the world we were chosen to be holy, and that holiness is a religious code word for radically loving (1 Thessalonians 3:12-13). Each day bombs of change are dropping that were launched in eternity past. Today may be your day. Will you seek this? New abilities to love.

God dropped a bomb on my life two years ago with a daughter named Talitha Ruth, and I am learning to love a little girl. What new love are you learning?

Come, Little Lamb
'For Talitha Ruth on her 2nd Birthday

Come, lay your head down, little lamb,
And rest upon my shoulder;
It won’t be long till you’re too big,
And both of us are older.

Come, lay your head here, little lamb,
Your wool against my face;
And feel your father’s silent love,
Secure in my embrace.

Come, lay your head close, little lamb,
And listen to my heart;
And memorize the message there,
For when we are apart.

Come, lay your head now, little lamb,
While there is still a place;
I cannot promise life or strength,
Nor shape tomorrow’s grace.

Come, lay your head, my little lamb,
And listen on my shoulder;
The voice of Jesus deep within:
“That’s just the way I hold her.”

Daddy
10-11-97