Closer Than You Think: A 5-Day Devotional by Jonathan TraylorSample

Closer Than You Think | Day 2 This Kind of Love

You're closer than I think

Closer than the air I breathe

It's not a mystery
That I’m your child and your heart for me

Is not of this world

It’s a love so undeserved

It won’t leave you where you are
It erases every scar

- This Kind of Love!

The faithful love of God took me years to understand. I grasped the concept, but not the tangible experience of His love. I made the common mistake to let my circumstances shape my thoughts and expectations of God’s love. Can you say the same?

I think of Romans 5:5 when Paul says:

“This hope will not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”

I spent so much of my life waiting for love to disappoint me. Whether through abuse or rejection by people that said that they loved me, I learned that love should be second-guessed. It was fickle. Temporal. Like cotton candy. Sweet, but it disappears as soon as you taste it. Love sounded nice, but just when I put confidence in it, I found myself being disappointed.

My first glimpse of a different kind of love came when I met my wife. Cliche? Absolutely. But her love saw me and chose to stay. She never overlooked my shortcomings but helped me to overcome them. I didn’t have to second guess it. How in the world could she love me in that way? In a way that made me feel sure, seen, and safe.

Her answer to that question was simple: “God”. My initial thought was that I must have been so hard to love that it took an ACT OF GOD to achieve it. Wrong. She was really saying that God was loving me through her. It was His love, not hers.

The second part of Romans 5:5 tells us that God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit. The Comforter allows us to experience a love that goes beyond the tangible. A love that makes us feel sure, seen, and safe. A love that we can hold on to because it’s holding on to us.

This kind of love sees us but never leaves. It’s the only thing that can change everything without changing itself. In God’s love, I can rest, rooted and firmly planted.