“‘There’s no pit so deep God’s love is not deeper still,’” I read, my voice coming out jagged.
“Mama, are you okay?” Flicka said. My girl was probably nine years old at the time.
I felt like saying, “Not really,” but instead I nodded as I remembered scenes from The Hiding Place, a 1975 movie I saw as a kid about the Holocaust. The words I read to my girls were Betsie Ten Boom’s, and the truth she uttered couldn’t be destroyed by the hatred that put her in Ravensbrück for loving the Jewish people.
I think about depths these days, and everything I read nudges me closer to their edges to peer into them. Some depths crave children, and they make me nauseous; there aren’t enough millstones in the world for all the necks that deserve them. Some depths sweep my breath away; there’s no getting to the bottom of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God. Some depths put me on my face; his compassion is too much for me as he hurls our sin into the depths of the sea.
Now a kids’ song plays in my head, and if you grew up in the Sunday School culture, oh, let’s say forever ago, you’ll hear it too (and probably do the actions that go with it):
Deep and wide, Deep and wide,
There’s a fountain flowing deep and wide.
Deep and wide, Deep and wide,
There’s a fountain flowing deep and wide.
In one of the next verses of the song, the reverse happens, and the speed ratchets up with its actions–Wide and deep, Wide and deep, and so on–and all hilarity ensues because kids love a chance to wiggle and act crazy in church.
On our epic family road trip in 2019, I stood alongside the family at the Grand Canyon’s South Rim and said, “That’s a big hole.” I needed better words to convey the vastness of that over-a-mile-deep river valley, but in its presence, I lost them.
And so it is today. I glimpse the wild depths of God, but I still don’t fully understand. I need the strength to comprehend what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.
I know this much, though: it’s worth peering over the edge to look.
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