Love is

Wowowowowow. Wow. Thank you, Father.

This quote from Hannah Hurnard's "Lessons Learned from the Slopes of the High Places" at the end of her book, Hinds Feet On High Places says it best:

"Love is not a feeling. It is an overmastering passion to help and bless and deliver and comfort and strengthen and give joy to others just as the Lord Jesus always did.

"Here on earth we have the opportunity to do what the God of love does all the time, and to learn to abandon ourselves to loving and giving, to seeking, and to saving others. Not a lovely feeling of affection, or physical pleasure and satisfaction, but the extreme eternal ecstasy of creating happiness and good and blessed things for others to enjoy. To cast ourselves down like the Brumbach falls, in happy giving, asking for nothing in return except for the joy of so doing. When we really begin to learn and practice that lesson we shall begin to feel 'at home' in the eternal world of selfless love.

"Here in Les Avants, God has been saying to me over and over again, 'It is so happy to love without asking to be loved in return. Dare to be happy!' it is not some feeling one waits for, nor some special person to evoke the love. It is an attitude of will. I will cast myself down in giving. The lower I go the more love I am able to transmit from God to others, just like the Lord of love himself, who was not content until he found and took the lowest place in the universe. I spend my days on the earth to learn this lesson, so that I may be able to love forever."

So crazy in love with the way our God works. He's such an artist! A master orchestrator.

Experiencing this:

Then he went on, "Now for the flower of Love and for the promise that when it blooms you will be loved in return."

Grace and Glory spoke for the first time. "My Lord and King," she said softly, "there is no flower of Love to bloom in my heart. It was burned to ashes on the altar at thy command."

"No flower of Love?" he repeated, and laughed again so gently and joyfully that she could hardly bear it. "That is strange, Grace and Glory. How, then, did you get here? You are right on the High Places, in the Kingdom of Love itself. Open your heart and let us see what is there."

At his word she laid bare her heart, and out came the sweetest perfume she had ever breathed and filled all the air around them with its fragrance. There in her heart was a plant whose shape and form could not be seen because it was covered all over with pure white, almost transparent blooms, from which the fragrance poured forth.

Grace and Glory gave a little gasp of wonder and thankfulness. "How did it get there, my Lord and King?" she exclaimed.

"Why, I planted it there myself," was his laughing answer. "Surely you remember down there by the sheep pool in the Valley of Humiliation, on the day that you promised to go with me to the High Places. It is the flower from the thorn-shaped seed."

"Then, my Lord, what was the plant which the priest tore our of my heart when I was bound to the altar?"

"Do you remember, Grace and Glory, when you found that my kind of love was not there at all--only the plant of Longing-to-be-loved?"

She nodded wonderingly.

"That was the natural human love which I tore out from your heart when the time was ripe and it was loose enough to be uprooted altogether so that the real Love could grow there alone and fill your whole heart."

...

"And now for the promise," said he, "that when Love flowers in your heart you shall be loved again." Taking her hand in his, he said, "Behold I have set my love upon thee and thou art mine ... yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with loving-kindness have I drawn thee" (Jer. 31:3)

(from Hinds Feet on High Places)

+ Brent quoting: Isaiah 40:30-31

"Even youths shall faint and be weary,
and young men shall fall exhausted;
but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
they shall walk and not faint.

= Open the floodgates and let the tears (and snot) FLOW.

So grateful to be a part of the Kingdom of Love.