I sat in my office across from Lisa as her words of brokenness and disillusionment tumbled out of the depths of her heart. Too many people had spoken of loving her only to betray her trust as she entered into relationship with them. Her father had been the first to break her heart when he abandoned her and her mother when she was not yet eight years old. During high school and college one boy after another said words her heart was aching to hear, but she learned too late the words did not mean what she so longed to know.

These wounds caused her to mistrust almost any expression of love and even to doubt the Lord loved her. When her words ended, she looked up at me through her tears and said, “I don’t really know what love is.”

My heart was aching as she had been speaking and she noticed a tear that silently trickled down my cheek when she looked up. I had heard so many stories of brokenness and disappointment and I wanted to find some way to convey to her what I sensed the Lord wanted her to hear. How could I possibly find the words?

Over the rest of the hour we were together, I sensed the Lord leading me to words, scripture passages and a prayer that seemed to comfort her.

When I was alone in my office after she left, I said to the Lord, “Tell me about your love”. I knew about His love, believed in it, could not comprehend it and yet accepted it as truth. My heart was still full from the time with Lisa. I needed to hear more about love from the One who WAS and IS love.

As I seemed to sense His whispers to my heart, I felt as though He had wrapped His arms around me and held me close to His heart. I jotted down what I felt I was hearing. I wanted to share them with Lisa when we next met.

The words seemed to flow from His heart to mine, “When you feel your heart warming and your words reach to touch the wound at the core of another person, you have sampled only a small fraction, a small taste of my love. When your eyes well up in tears as you listen, you have felt only a small taste of my sorrow and my passion.”

“My passion and love are as mighty as the highest waterfall and gushing river, as sturdy as the most majestic mountain, but as delicate as dew upon a rose, or the softness of a baby’s cheek. It was my desire and my design for you to experience it all the time, to know unveiled, unclothed intimacy and to know love more certainly than breathing.”

Tears welled up in my eyes as I recognized in a new way the cost of sin to me, to Him, to all of us.

My heart and spirit leaned closer to listen more carefully and I picked up my pen once again.

“I would have you speak often to me of love for it is the teacher, the most powerful and strongest thing in the world—more than pain, hate, anguish, terror, or even death itself. Love unleashed releases me and all of who I am to another. Such love gives you ‘hind’s feet in high places’ and lets us dance upon the mountaintops and see things more from my view. Feel my embrace. Feel my heart.”

I knew with fresh clarity what He longed for Lisa to know, but I also knew it at a depth that went beyond words and overflowed into the deepest recesses of my being.

It has been sixteen years since that day with Lisa and His words telling me more about His love still overflow within my heart.