Prodigal:  This grass has grown!

Me:  It looks like it’s about knee high to a giraffe.

Prodigal:  I reckon it does.

Me:  Have fun mowing!

 

This is form the book Bold Love by Dr. Dan B. Allender & Dr. Tremper Longman III

 

Love often succombs to a cold death on the sharp rocks of disappointment.  Love cannot last long or live out its eternal purpose in human relationships without a foundation of forgiveness–the forgiveness from God for our failure to love with a pure, other-centered heart, and forgiveness when the recipient of our love spurns our gift or uses our soul in an unloving fashion.  Unless the fabric of our involvement with others is woven with the threads of forgiveness, love will suffer the corruption of denial, hardness, cynicism, and eventually hatred.

Given the reality of sin, love and forgiveness are inextricably bound together.  God is continually, literally, second-by-second covering our sin under His Son’s blood and forgiving us our sins.  God cannot love us unless He forgives us and cannot forgive us without a commitment to love us.  Love and forgiveness are equally bound together in all human relationships.  I cannot hope to ever love someone unless I am committed to forgive him.  I cannot hope to ever forgive him–that is, truly forgive him–unless I know the rich, incomprehensible joy of being forgiven.

 

Please forgive me.  Then please love me again.

 

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee:  my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is.

Psalm 63:1

 

Jennifer Van Allen

www.theprodigalpig.com

www.faithincounseling.org