In His Time

I remember singing this little chorus in Sabbath school:

In his time, in his time,

He makes all things beautiful in his time

Lord please show me every day

As you're teaching me your way

That you do just what you say

In your time.

If everything in my life could be laid out on a table and sifted through carefully, it would say one thing above all else, God is love.

God is extreme love. He is nothing but love, and oh, how he loves us. He loves to love us. He loves it when we love each other.

Every once in a while I am forced to understand God's love in a new way. Like when I had a cabin full of kids in the middle of nowhere Alaska who puked and fought and cussed and cried and made each other cry. They were ugly kids. They smelled bad. I thought only God and their mothers could love them. I was pretty sure about God and less sure about their mothers, who obviously didn't mind a week of separation.

Five days later, I loved them, and I don't even know why. They still fought and stank and threw up (why did they always throw up?), but now I knew them. I knew Kulang kept a dictionary in his bag and was reading it cover to cover. He was in "m." I knew Lam really wanted to know his Bible. I knew David wanted to control his temper but lacked something--someone--that could tell him how. I knew that Jacob's family smoked so much weed that he couldn't get on a varsity sports team because the secondhand smoke would make him fail a drug test. I knew Christian wanted more than anything to love God as much as God loves him. And somewhere in the brokenness of these kids' lives I found that love is stronger than imperfection. In fact, love gravitates toward imperfection.

Suddenly I knew God loves me. I knew it. Maybe I even felt it.

I know how broken I am. If I could love these kids, maybe, maybe, all the songs I sang in Cradle Roll are true. Maybe God really does love us so much that he died for me.

I am so glad that God shares his love with us. Even when we don't see his love, it's there, working in us and around us. Sometimes it makes us wait...

And wait...

And wait...

And freaking wait.

But in the end, I'm compelled to realize that God's love does not take a vacation in the time when we doubt it exists. I'm very thankful that God's love brought me closer to a girl who loves God as much as I do and has the spiritual integrity to listen to a proposition that went right over my head. A proposition that said,

Wait. I love you two, but I have something better in mind. Wait. I love you, I love you, I love you. If you only knew how much I love you.

I'm starting to pick up on that love, and it's making my head spin.