How Wide and Long and High and Deep

This summer I’ve been tracking the Pennsylvania budget impasse, and doing what I can to advocate for restoration of deep funding cuts to our state’s education. I’ve been writing emails to representatives and key legislative leaders, encouraging others to do the same. We have the most inequitable public education in the nation. I know some of those children in schools without libraries, library books, librarians. And I know some of those young adults who had hoped to college and found any help to get there had vanished.

I’ve been asked why I care. Most people I know don't. Not much. Unless their own kids are in one of those schools most affected.

Why care?

I’ve been finding that caring is a calling, and I can point to the start of mine.

It was a quarter century ago, an evening after a too-long, too-hard day. We had three small nieces spending the week with us, to give their parents a break, and I’d made the mistake of letting the whole crew camp together in our basement playroom. We had a baby, asleep in her room upstairs, and five excited children arranged between a pull-out couch and some comforters on the floor. Upstairs it was quiet. Downstairs, it was mayhem.

I was tired, impatient, ready to be done with the day. We’d done too many trips to the bathroom, too many last drinks of water, too many “just one more” stories. Lights, and night lights, had been on and off too many times to count. I sat on the hard wood of the basement steps, head in hands, and prayed.

I’m sure it wasn’t an eloquent prayer. More along the lines of “I don’t know how to do this, I don’t know why I put myself in this place, and God, I don’t love these kids. And I don’t feel like you love me. Show me. Show me that love that surpasses knowledge, and help me love these kids.”

No bright lights. No sudden voice. No angel song. But on those hard wood stairs, in that dark stairwell, I felt suddenly surrounded by a warmth and care that pressed in close and filled my empty heart. And I had a vision of God’s love. Not a visible vision, but a strange sense of being loved with a love that was firm, and patient, that would take as long as needed, that would hold me steady no matter what wind or waves swept past me. That wasn’t comparing me to anyone else, wasn’t grading me by some impossible standard. A warm, present, listening love, that melted my hard sad heart and still brings me to tears when I think of it.

Trying to describe it, I realize words fall short.  God was giving me a glimpse of a passage from Ephesians I had prayed without knowing what I was praying, words I had memorized and taped inside my kitchen cupboard door:

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And 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. 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 in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. (Ephesians 3:14 to 21) 

I had understood God’s love – in concept. And I had tried to live it- as a job description, a too-hard task I’d been given along with all the other too-hard tasks. But did I grasp it? Was I rooted in it? Was I filled with it? Was I strengthened by it?

My own parents disappeared a month before I turned two. They were married too young, had four kids too fast, and struggled with undiagnosed depressions and disorders in a time when no one knew how to help. My siblings and I grew up in our grandparents’ home, until my grandfather sold it and announced he was done with parenthood and with us. From there, it was a rocky road through high school, with uncertain attention from our grandmother and other adults who appeared and disappeared as they were blown along by the changing circumstances of their lives.

I had no doubt that I had been loved along the way, but a limited vision of what strong, steady parental love would look like, and not enough experience of it to pass along.

I’d seen, from a distance, some imposters. I’d seen the selfish parental love that treated the child as extension of the parents’ ego. I’d seen the needy love that would give anything to earn the child’s approval. I’d seen dictatorial parents who treated their children like robots, or little wind-up toys. I’d seen neglectful, episodic love, swooping in to say “Isn’t she cute!” then turning away to other interests. I was thankful to have been spared those facsimiles of love, but not sure the task-oriented form of care I’d been given, and knew how to give, was enough.

And yes, I’d been told that the very definition of love was Christ’s death on the cross. I’d memorized John 15: “Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

And yes, I was familiar with that famous chapter about love, 1 Corinthians 13. I’d memorized it in high school, and memorized it again as a parent: “Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”

I worked hard on all of those things: patience was almost impossible. Kindness? Sometimes. Anger? That depended on the day. Record of wrongs? Still working on it.

 

The fact is - it was work. And that was the heart of the problem: it was all work. Rocking a baby late at night. Diapers. Laundry. Long, bored afternoons. The challenge of making dinner while kids whined underfoot. Work.

But there was an inner deficit, a hollowness inside that sang its sad song to me in those late night sessions while I rocked and sang a fussy baby back to sleep. I could do the work of a parent, but the heart of a parent seemed to be missing. I had started from a place of depletion - and the more I gave, the emptier I grew.

Sitting on the basement steps, I found something in me changing. It wasn’t a “conversion” – I was already following Christ as faithfully as I knew how. It was what Paul described in Ephesians: I began to grasp the boundless love of Christ, and began to be filled, in a new way, with the boundless fullness of God. Calling out for help, I found that help holding me, surrounding me. Singing a new song to my tired, hungry heart.

So what was different? The best I can say is I began to understand, somewhere beyond my head, what that phrase, “God’s love,” really meant. I was no longer trying to earn something that I knew I could never earn. I knew, in some deep, unexplainable way, that I was loved, and that God’s love, even when I couldn’t feel it, was present, at work, surrounding me.

From that evening on, I knew my role as parent was to do my best to offer a reflection of that love: Unchangeable. Wanting their best. Not dependent on their good behavior, their compliance, their good will. I could love them when they slammed the door, and could remind them, patiently, that they were free to be angry, but not free to be rude. I could love them when they made me look bad, interfered with my plans, challenged my priorities.

It started there, but bubbled far past that. If God loved me beyond understanding, beyond width and length and height and depth, then there was no edge to that love flowing past me, into places of need I had never seen before.

POWER: Philadelphians Organized to Witness Empower & Rebuild

I’ve watched with amazement as that love reaches through me to embrace others I’ve met along the way: silent children with hungry eyes, angry teens itching for a fight. Awkward adults caught in their own unyielding dramas.

And it bubbles up in waves of longing for equity and justice for those I know God loves: overworked teachers in crowded classrooms, desperate parents wanting a decent chance for their kids. All those beautiful, needy little ones, part of God’s family, children of his heart, waiting for the same care given other children.

That love flows out in ways I often can’t predict, can’t explain, sometimes can’t control. 

New every morning. 

Stronger every day.

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And 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.

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 in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

[This is a revision of a post from 2011, Love Is.  I'll be reworking some earlier posts this summer, as travel and time outside limit my time for blogging.]

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