THE LOVE OF OUR DREAMS

(I am in Midland this week up to my ears in cute grandkids, so I'm cheating today; I am using today's entry from my devotional book. It's one of my favorites. So for those of you who are being doubly loyal to my writing, you are hereby excused from class. It's a beautiful day, at least in Midland. Go outside to recess. I've got three little delightful faces waiting to be cradled.)

"The Lord your God is with you. He is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you. He will quiet you with His love. He will rejoice over you with singing" (Zephaniah 3:17). Recently while working on a craft project, I watched the old, original version of The Parent Trap. When it got to the part where Maureen O'Hara stood face-to-face with the Hayley Mills she hadn't seen in years, I had to drop everything else I was doing and allow my longing eyes to latch fully onto the scene before me. For that one minute or playacting alone, Mrs. O'Hara deserved an Oscar. Her eyes widened a bit to focus in on and drink in every drop of the face of her child as one dying of thirst might swallow down the last drop of water in a canteen. The camera telescoped in on the mother's inimitable green eyes to show them filling with a kind of light that turned them even greener and radiated out to brighten her entire face. Then ever so tenderly, her hands cradled her daughter's face as though she were touching something rare and fragile that few others might ever get to touch. You knew that this mother was entirely in this place. She was completely undivided in her thoughts, so caught up in the moment that her heart knew no other love but this one that she gazed upon with no words and touched as fine china. She was swept away from any reality but this one B eauty before her by which she was totally enraptured. As I watched, I knew why I was so captured by this scene; it was my deepest longing. It was the epitome of delight. One of the frustrations I have with the English language is its lack of words to describe all the different flavors of love. Whereas Greek has several words to describe various kinds of love, English seems to be stuck with a one-size-fits-all word, and the longer I live and love, the more certain I am that the word "love" is far too general to evoke all the appropriate messages it is called upon to do. Thus, we use it to describe everything from how we feel about this taste of enchiladas to the thrill of riding a roller coaster to our deepest and most sacred familial feelings. Every time I am brought back to this scripture, I realize that there is another word that says what I want it to about some of those very rare and special feelings: delight. This scripture is one of my favorites and thus keeps popping up with regularity at the top of these pages. It's not that God's Word isn't replete with inspirational messages so that I would need to repeat any of them; it's just that this one speaks vociferously to what I cherish most in my memories and dream of most as encores in the future: feeling delight, both in and from another. Delighting is a very specialized kind of loving that means I am not just one-size-fits-all loved," but that someone finds me captivating. There are so many shortcomings that scream that I am unworthy and unlovely that to learn that God could feel this way about me is for sure the best news I could possibly hear. I suppose to want to feel such adoration could be interpreted as vain and idolatrous, but God Himself uses the same word to call us to Him. "Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart" (Psalms 37:4). He knows what can come from pure delight. Fall into His arms today, feel His hands around your face, gaze upon the beauty of Christ, and delight in Him as He delights in you. (From Broken Jar: 365 Days on the Potter's Wheel, Jan Doke, Xulon Press, 2009).