only he who has experienced it can believe what the love of Jesus Christ is. – Bernard of Clairvaux
You could more easily catch a hurricane in a shrimp net than you can understand the wild, relentless, passionate, uncompromising, pursuing love of God made present in the manger.
In 1980, the day before Christmas, Richard Ballenger’s mother in Anderson, South Carolina, was busy wrapping packages and asked her young son to shine her shoes. Soon, with a proud smile that only a seven-year-old can muster, he presented the shoes for inspection. His mother was so please, she gave him a quarter.
On Christmas morning as she put on the shoes to go to church, she noticed a lump in one shoe. She took it off and found a quarter wrapped in paper. Written on the paper in her child’s scrawl were the words, “I done it for love.”
When the curtain falls, each of us will be the sum of our choices throughout life, the sum of the appointments we kept and the appointments we didn’t keep. When interrogated as to why we hung out at a stable, why we were detained by a baby in swaddling clothes, may we answer, “We done it for love.”
– Brennan Manning
life: acoustic & amplified 