I’m standing on my GO train this morning. Sometimes I get a seat, but not today. I’m on the upper level of a double decker train car – the “quiet zone” where nobody talks on their phone or to each other. We just read or doze or text or blog, and I’m watching rows and rows of people do their thing, and I’m thinking about how much God loves us.
It always boggles my mind when I see Torre in a group of kids, when I arrive for daycare pick up and the classroom is busy with children playing, or when I lose sight of him at a playground and then catch the flash of his bright orange shirt, because at the moment when I see him in the crowd my heart cracks open a little bit with love. I could (and I have) watch that boy sleep and not be bored, just soak in every cell of him alive and mine and at peace. What boggles my mind when I feel the heart-crack of mother love is that in the sea of children where I see my son, every child has a mother whose heart will do the same thing (or should) at the sight of them.
I’m preparing a sermon, and I’ve been thinking a lot about God’s love, and as I stand on this train, I can’t help but imagine these 72 people as kids on a bus, each with a parent waiting to catch their eye except that God is the parent and he lights up for each one of us. He smiles fondly at his children – the open mouth sleepers, the slumped over nappers, the middle-aged suit whose head keeps rolling back then crashing forward like we’re all on a roller coaster; and the awake children too – the makeup fixers and eBook readers and email checkers, and one guy who had to bite his fist to stop from breaking the quiet zone with a laugh at something on his phone.
I think of weird stuff sometimes on the GO train. I try to guess how much it would cost to replace the clothing and technology of a car’s worth of commuters, or I wonder how much car debt is represented by the full parking lot at the train station, or I try to imagine each person as they were at age 5. Picturing the children that people used to be helps me imagine some of the tenderness that God feels toward them, although I also know that the love of God for his people is deeper and wider and fiercer than I can ever imagine. We are so loved, you and I, them and us. We are so loved.
Yes we are! Isn’t that mom’s heart thing phenomenal? I sometimes wonder how it can be that my heart doesn’t actually burst sometimes with the joy / delight / love that bursts when I catch a glimpse of the one I love. The intensity of that is a good reminder of what God may feel, and that should definitely affect how we treat one another. Thanks for writing!
It amazes me that when we have grandchildren our hearts continue to grow and burst with pride with each one. I know this is true if you have 1 grandchild or 40 your heart continues to grow. To my mind this is how God views us, his children, each one is loved as intensely as the next.