One summer, which doesn’t seem too many years ago, our
family took off for Toronto, Canada by car via several stops including Niagara Falls.
These children are in college now, but God is still teaching through our experiences on that trip.
The Niagara River runs north twenty-three miles from Lake
Erie to Niagara Falls and then moves on another thirteen miles to Lake Ontario.
The Falls themselves transcend any idyllic picture postcard depiction, because
it was not so much how Niagara Falls looked that moved me, but how the
waterfall made me feel.
It felt like unrelenting, unending explosions of power.
We drove beyond the falls, and witnessed the escalating
force of the Cascade rapids. The rapids churned the water towards the precipice
of the falls, a mighty torrent of six million cubic feet of water plummeting over
the falls every second.
Yet the power of Niagara is miniscule compared to the power
of God.
As I stood at the rail looking out
over the falls, the water misting my face, I gained a greater understanding of how big, how mighty, and
how powerful God is.
Yesterday, I read again in Brennen Manning’s Abba’s Child, “Living in awareness of our belovedness is the axis around
which the Christian life revolves. Being the beloved is our identity.” Understanding
the quality of God’s love for us makes a difference every moment of our lives.
But the questions assualt us--will his love hold? Will it last?
At one time in my life, if you’d asked me if the sense I had
at Niagara Falls had anything to do with intimacy with God, with His love for
us, I might have said no—that the power, the might, the thunder are other
dimensions of God which don’t inform His intimacy. But I would’ve been wrong.
Power and might have everything to do with God’s love,
because his love is not fragile, but awesomely strong. His love is strong
enough to endure, to last, to hold with a tenacity we can’t begin to imagine and
yet tender and gentle at the same time.
Manning again: “Suppose for a moment that in a flash of
insight you discovered that all your motives for ministry were essentially egocentric,
or suppose that last night you got drunk and committed adultery, or suppose
that you failed to respond to a cry for help and the person committed suicide.
What would you do?
“Would guilt, self-condemnation, and self-hatred consume
you, or would you jump into the water and swim a hundred yards at breakneck
speed toward Jesus? ...would you let Jesus be who He is—a Savior of boundless
compassion and infinite patience…?”
The sense I had of the immensity of God’s power at Niagara translates
to the immensity of God’s love.
A wise
tentmaker said it well, “For I am convinced that neither death
nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor
any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything
else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is
in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).