Unimaginable

My family has faced some really unimaginable circumstances. The most recent was my husband's two week hospital stint due to seizures. That experience left him so horribly dizzy he couldn't be left home alone. Meanwhile, I was working full-time, managing our home and keeping our two teenage children grounded. Life was unbelievably hard in that season.

The crazy part was how quickly everything turned upside down. One moment things were stable and the next we were in the midst of crisis, fear and chaos.

I know that we are not alone in facing the unimaginable; in this fallen world, we all do, in one way or another. Thankfully, we have our hope in God who loves us more than we can comprehend and wields power greater than anything we face.

In Ephesians chapter 3 the apostle Paul pens a prayer for believers that reads,

"... I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord's holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God." (vs. 17b-19 NIV)

Jesus loves me is a pretty basic source of hope in difficulty. It might not feel like enough. But Paul says, that we need to dig our roots down in and hold on tight to that love and that it actually isn't easy to comprehend the enormity of it.

God's love is unimaginable!

The truth is, no matter what we feel or how much we might struggle to see God in our chaos; we are surrounded in love that surpasses knowledge and knows no bounds.

Psalm 103:11 tell us, "... as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him." Have you ever seen an eclipse? Those are awesome displays in our solar system. But our sun and moon don't begin to touch the vastness of the "heavens" and God's love is higher.

"As far as the East is from the West," the Psalm continues, "so far has he removed our transgressions from us." There is no condemnation, no guilt, no shame in the everlasting arms of God's wide, wide love.

Deuteronomy 31 tells us that God goes before us. This means that when your journey is long- when all you want is to get through and be done with that thing, but there's no end in sight - God's love is longer. He goes before us, we will never get beyond Him or His love. Others might get tired of walking that road with you, but God never will.

And no matter the depth of our pain, God's love is deeper. We can cry with David, "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?" (Psalm 13:1) He's not going to pull away. His love will always be under us sustaining us, even in the pit of despair.

God's love is wide and long and high and deep. Paul says be rooted in and hold on to this unimaginable love of Christ and he doesn’t stop there. He could have closed his prayer right there with - now to God be the glory. Instead, he reminds us who we're dealing with and says, "Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to Him be glory..."

God can do more than we can ask or imagine with any circumstance. He has unimaginable power and we can trust him come what may.

That doesn't mean we will get what we want or always be happy or life will be easy. There is no question that God can fix everything in the blink of an eye but, many times, he doesn't.

Our nature in those moments is to doubt Him, but our roots help us to trust. We can choose to remember that our wisdom is foolishness to Him. The best result we could possibly fathom doesn't touch what He is able to do. So when He doesn't do what we desperately want or think is just, we can trust that He has it under control.

He has unimaginable power.

I don't know what circumstances you are going to encounter in the coming year - personally, professionally, in your community, or the issues our country, and world will face. Unfortunately, I know many people will be working through some unimaginable stuff.

As the year comes to a close, I pray as Paul did, that we will remain rooted, hold on tight to God's love and trust His power. Because whatever we face He is ready for it. We will not experience the one heartache that God can't mend and we won't face the one situation that He isn't prepared to manage.

His love and His power know no bounds. They're unimaginable.

They are enough and He is Enough!

#heisenough

#unimaginable