Deeper

(into love)

I don’t remember when I first heard Jill Phillips sing, but I remember the song. It was called “I Am,” and after it slid into my chest like a hot knife through butter, it gathered up the fragmented bits of me and cradled them close, like a mother holds a child. I was undone in the kindest of ways.

In the years since (it’s been at least two decades) Jill’s bell-clear voice and beautiful words have continued to companion me on my spiritual pilgrimage. My old CD version of “I Am” has become a part of a just-as-well-worn Spotify JP playlist, along with other way-markers like “All the Good Things”, “Even Still”, “Any Other Way”, “Wrecking Ball” and “Grand Design.”

Lately, though, the song of Jill’s on repeat for me is one called “Bright Sadness.” And like so much of life, its magic is in its confusing contradiction.

Have you noticed that the very things that hurt us to hold on to are the same ones that can heal us? That what G. K. Chesterton called “life’s great, fiery possibilities” we did not want or expect can make us more whole than we could have ever been without them? That God can use the “bright sadness” of failure or separation or divorce or disease or regret to strengthen the weave of our faith and make us better somehow?

I have.

And these days I am noticing it more and more.

There’s more beauty in the terrible and more ache in the beautiful than we could ever imagine. And the way through these hard places isn’t denial or deadening or detachment. It’s moving further in along the fault lines, and deeper into love.

There’s a plainly unpoetic verse in John’s gospel that has always struck me as profound. It reminds me that Jesus, loving his band of brothers and knowing He will soon leave them, doesn’t drift away in self-protection. He presses in. He goes even deeper into His love for them: Jesus knew that his hour had come to leave this world and return to his Father. He had loved his disciples during his ministry on earth, and now he loved them to the very end. (John 13:1, NLT)

He could have turned aside, eased away, disappeared. But He didn’t. He pressed deeper into His love for them.

I don’t know where you’re feeling the rub today between the present pain of life and the eternal love of God, but I believe to embrace the first is to more fully know the second. And that everything—everything—resolves as we move deeper into love.

God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.

1 John 4:16, NLT