God's Love is Forever by Dan Owens

languages

My first girlfriend in high school used to write passionate letters that she’d always end with, "Love you forever." She didn’t love me forever—she dumped me after eight months for a better looking guy and broke my heart.

People promise to love us forever, but only God stays perfectly true to His promise. God’s love doesn’t stop, which is quite significant in a society that nearly boasts of infidelity and betrayal.

Can we really find a love that is unending. Yes! God proclaims, "I have loved you with an everlasting love" (Jeremiah 31:3).

"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" the apostle Paul asked. "Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?" (Romans 8:35). Having experienced the pain of life, Paul was saying that when we go through difficult times we sense the love of God in an even greater measure.

When Al Egg, the Portland Trailblazers’ chaplain, first shared with me that he had lost his teenage daughter in a car accident, he smiled when he said it was during that awful time of grief that he felt the love and nearness of God unlike any other time in his life.

When my son Ben was little, he tripped and fell face first into the side of our deck in the back yard. I heard the awful thud and ran to pick him up. I’m not sure which was worse, his screaming or the blood. My heart was pounding as I scooped him into my arms and headed for the house.

Ben had taken a bite of wood out of the deck, jamming his teeth up into his gums. With the bleeding subsiding and both our doctor and dentist telling us that Ben probably did not need medical attention, I sat down with my son in my reclining chair. Back we went, Ben on my lap with one of my arms around him and the other holding ice inside his upper lip. His crying subsided and my parental fears diminished.

After about 30 minutes, I asked Ben if he wanted to get down from my lap. He assured me he did not!

Forty-five minutes passed, and I asked again. No, he didn’t!

I checked again after an hour—he was quite comfortable where he was.

Finally after about an hour and 20 minutes, Ben decided he could get down and play again.

Up until that day, the longest I had held Ben on my lap was about 15 minutes, but on this day before Easter I held him for more than an hour. Why? First, Ben knew he was hurt. Second, he knew I would not make him get down. And third, with my arms wrapped around him and kissing him on his head, Ben knew, "Dad loves me." As he felt the pain that came from his fall, he also felt the unending love that came from his father.

We all experience pain in many forms. No matter what kind of hurt we are experiencing, we have the blessing of being able to go to our Father, whose arms of love hold us forever.

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