love notes

Remember those hearts you drew on your notebook in high school, the ones with "K.S. + M.T." or whatever written inside? Maybe you didn't write them... but truth be told, I imagine most of us wanted to, even if we were guarded (smartly so) enough to avoid doing so. I can't claim to have been one who ever guarded my heart. And therefore, if you were to find a notebook - or textbook or planner - that belonged to me in the late nineties, rest assured it would have scribbles all over it detailing my latest teenage love.

This has been a good week. I know so many of you are longing to know what's been going on... what we've been up to, what we've been thinking of...

Well, here's the truth: for some crazy reason, I want to scribble hearts all over my computer screen. I think of you all, so many of you who are praying for us, on your knees, in your bed at night, driving in your car on the way to work, cleaning the kitchen, studying at the library, watching movies on the big-screen, rocking babies and walking dogs, traveling to foreign lands and sitting on screened-in porches, all of you doing the things that make life living... and yet still remembering us as you talk with your God. And I love Him, love Him, love Him for that. For only He can wake us up, take us out of ourselves, if even for brief moments, and cause us to speak to the Creator of the Universe on behalf of someone else.

Because of you, He has given me something new to stand on. Something more than me, something beyond me. I can't explain it. But I love Him for it. Because of you, He has renewed my sense of value, my sense of what matters. He's made me believe in Heaven again. He's reminded me that miracles are more than what we might always consider miraculous. He's changed my vision. What do I find myself in? What makes me feel like I matter? As a beautiful song I heard recently goes, "When the world is falling out from under me, I'll be found in You..." Amen. We are not meant to find ourselves in anything, anything, aside from Him. And somehow, somehow, in the midst of this extraordinary heartache Conor and I face, Jesus has been capable of showing us that - and of giving me a taste of what it would be like to believe it every day. We are found in Him. He is what makes us matter.

May you, wherever you are in life, whatever you are doing these days, whatever joys and sorrows be yours just now, somehow know that Jesus loves you, wholly and completely. That because of Him, every hair on your head matters. Funny that Copeland, having never taken a breath in this world, and perhaps only destined to take a few when she does, will know that with a surety you and I will struggle to grasp while we're on this side of eternity. She will never question her own significance, or whether she is loved. It is truly in Him, and only in Him, that she "lives and moves and has her being."