Tag Archives: unconditional love

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Matchless Love

We have recently been blessed by the birth of our first great-grandchild.

Alice Caroline Ledford

What joy she has brought to our family! We are thankful for her health and enjoying the response to her arrival from grandparents, aunts, great aunts and uncles, and second cousins.

Alice is surrounded by LOVE.

Our extended family is enamored of Alice and I am already being accused of dominating the available time for holding her. I just can’t seem to get enough cuddle time. I have to remind myself of the time honored advice – “let sleeping babies lie”. We haven’t had a little baby in our immediate family for 9 years and I now have “Grandma’s Precious” again. (It is hard to call grandsons who are over 6 ft. tall “precious”)

I was talking to my friend, Joyce, about God’s love for us and she was reminding me that God loves us – not because of what we DO – but because of who He is. We can never DO anything to make God love us more – His love is unconditional. As the old hymn states – God’s love is “so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all”

Our love for Alice is just a tiny reflection of God’s matchless love for us. Alice has not done anything to earn our love. She eats, sleeps, cries, poops, and repeats those behaviors – all to our delight. Delight because those behaviors demonstrate her health and development as a human being. Her crying doesn’t change our love. A messy diaper doesn’t change our love. A smile swells our hearts – but it doesn’t change a love that is already full to overflowing.

Ephesians 3: 18-19 explains the power of God’s love in our lives.

18 And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. 19 May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.

What a wonderful picture of God’s love for us! We can’t fully understand it – yet as I hold little Alice and my heart swells with love – I get a glimpse of my Father’s great love for me.

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Not Ashamed

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I am visiting my mother this week. I am staying with Mom in her apartment at the retirement community where she lives in Wheaton, Illinois.

This week is the year anniversary of my father’s passing on to his eternal reward. He is greatly missed.

My mother is doing well. She is active –

  • physically – exercising regularly
  • mentally – coordinating library services for her community
  • spiritually –  attending her local church and involved in Bible study in her community.

God has been so faithful.

Mother is very quick to give God the glory!

As we walk the hallways (two miles of carpeted hallways here), we see many people who I knew while growing up here in Wheaton. One lady yesterday said to me – “Oh, Gayle, I remember you in “Oklahoma” our school musical that year.

That was in 1969!

What really has struck me is the fact that I am immediately identified as Esther’s daughter. I was walking alone in the hall and a resident stopped me and asked me who I was. “You look familiar.” she said.

When I told her who I was and that I was Esther Barker’s daughter, she responded, “Of course! That is why you looked familiar. I knew Esther when she was your age.” (I now look very much like my mother did when she was 65.)

I have been told I look like my mother my whole life. I have never been ashamed of that fact – since it was so consistently expressed, it has always been one of those givens of my life, like having brown eyes, or being taller than average.

I have always been identified as Esther’s daughter.

That is who I am.

Is my identity as a daughter of my heavenly Father as easily identified? Do individuals that do not know me see Jesus in me?

Is Jesus evident in my words and actions?

That is who I am.

Paul says in Romans 1:16-17

16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. 17 For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

I realized that I have never been ashamed of being identified as Esther’s daughter because of the unconditional love she has always demonstrated toward me.

An even greater love has been demonstrated to all of us in God’s giving His one and only son  – Jesus – as the sacrifice for our sins.

I am not ashamed of the gospel. My desire is that I live in such a way that people identify me with the gospel.

May we live in these troubled times sharing the unconditional love our Heavenly Father has so freely shared with us.

Let us live  – not ashamed to be identified with Jesus.