Psalms 36 says, “Your unfailing love, O LORD, is as vast as the heavens; your faithfulness reaches beyond the clouds. Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your justice like the ocean depths. You care for people and animals alike, O LORD.”
I believe the Psalm above was the inspiration for the song “Here is Love vast as an ocean” which I used to sing when I started leading worship on Alpha courses and even taking the worship workshop out to Kenya and their churches there- a very humbling experience as their own worship was so spirit filled and life giving!
As we start a New Year, I would like us all to picture God‘s love for us as vast as an ocean.
There is no depth too low that God cannot reach and no height too high that he cannot see. He sees our pain and our wounds, he sees our joys and our hopes, he sees our love and our frustrations.
This year I would like us to dream impossible dreams, by which I mean, dreams we cannot imagine achieving on our own. If something seems too vast for us to accomplish, then it may mean it is God inspired, that it is too vast to accomplish without his help. So if we feel we aren’t up to the task, it is in that moment of ‘weakness’ when we can let God in to inspire us and to lead us on.
I believe that is what Saint Paul was getting at when he said “when I am weak then I am strong’, for it is in those moments of “weakness” and vulnerability that we begin to understand our true need for God, to guide us, to fill us and to help us thus fulfil his dreams for the world, through us. We are “his hands and feet” as Teresa of Avila reminds us.
These “impossible” dreams need to be things that don’t just build us up, but also build up those around us too. Dreams that are bigger than we are and will continue to grow even when we have gone. Dream are not mutually exclusive when divinely inspired, they help and heal others and ourselves at the same time. Things we enjoy and love, the gifts God has given to us, they can nourish and enrich us, but they are also created to be shared.
The gifts which God has given you to use are not just for your own pleasure, but to be used in turn to bless and to nourish those around you.
If we are afraid to use those gifts, we may miss the big dreams and plans that God has for the world through us, through you and through me.
I heard the story of one NDE-er (near death experience) who on entering heaven was taken to a room piled high with unopened gifts. When she asked what and who the packages were for, she was told they were hers, her gifts- all the gifts she had been given throughout her life which she had so far failed to use. She was then told that she wasn’t going to die at that point, but that she was to go back and to start opening the boxes and using all those gifts she had failed to use before.
Sometimes we just are too fearful to step out and use the gifts God has given us for purposes that are larger than our mere comfort or enjoyment- sometimes we are called to take risks so that we can bless those around us with those gifts, sometimes when we are “afraid” and that fear is the prompt.
When the ocean seems too big, or too deep, or too vast, that is the moment that we need to dive in, to allow God to carry us on and through to the other side.
We are not alone and our gifts are not there to sit on a shelf for eternity for us to simply admire, they are there to be opened and to be used for God’s glory and his purposes and not simply our own.
So why not try to work out what those gifts are for you today? What are those things that give you a feeling of fulfilment and purpose? The free gifts of God that are unique to you and that you feel free and joy filled when you do?
Why not now imagine them expanded to the size of ocean? Picture that ocean as vast, seemingly as never ending as the horizon line, and know that this is the love God has for you and for me.
Why not choose to open your gifts, may be just one at a time today? Why not choose to dive in to that large ocean of abundance of ideas and dreams and…
…Be blessed!
