At the Gates

…experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully…  Ephesians 3:19 (NLT)

Dante wrote that there was a sign which hangs over the entrance to hell: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”  I’ve heard some people say that hell is right here on earth, others that hell is a very literal place.  When I watch the eleven o’clock news, when I see pictures of the kids in Africa with bellies swollen from starvation and disease – hell, right here on earth.  I shudder when I think of the possibility of a literal, burning hell – frightful.  But one thing both ideas of hell have in common is that they are hopeless.

I have sensed hopelessness, nay even despair a number of times in my life.  So far this year alone I have been acquainted with that feeling a couple times.  Looking back, even at the very recent past, I have seen myself standing (figuratively mind you) at those gates with all hope abandoned, despair having enveloped me, and all because of situations I have in some way or another…created myself.

All this brings me to realize a couple things.  I am my own worst enemy.  I am a (terribly) fallen creature.  Unworthy.  Unholy.  Exceedingly wicked.  Unlovely.  Not so much in a fleshly way, because, well – I’m actually a little teddy bear, relatively nice, and at least a little less than hideous.  But, spiritually speaking – unlovely.

Pulling out the ledger and calculating the sum-total of my life, I find myself utterly lacking in any redeemable way in which a Holy and Just God could look into me and find anything worth loving.  Yet…here I am.  God draws me.  Christ died for me.  Ugh!  HE DIED FOR ME.  Unfathomable.  Not just in a bunch-of-black-pixels-on-top-of-white-ones kind of way, it’s unfathomable in an I-try-to-wrap-my-head-around-it-but-just-can’t-understand-it kind of way. 

Jesus, God incarnate, chose to suffer and die – such was his love.  In a recent moment of despair, at a moment of trying to make out the letters on a sign above a gate:  A   b    a   n    d    o    n  … I was exposed, touched by? the love of Christ in a way I will never understand.  It sounds so trite on virtual paper, yet in reality so profound.  I don’t get it, but wow!

I suppose love is experiential not understandable. Love is something to be felt, joined in, participated in, given, received...but never understood.  How much more so the love of Christ.