The Unbounded Love of God

 

I stood on the second floor walkway of the mission guest house and looked out over a cityscape of varicolored concrete and corrugated tin.  Smoke from many cook fires drifted skyward past spreading branches of fan palm trees.  Early morning sounds of crowing roosters and brush brooms on dirt courtyards rose on the warm air.  I recalled stepping off the plane in Accra: stepping into heat like a fog, into a rush of sounds--voices with lilting English and a variety of tribal languages blended into one melodious chorus of tongues, into the smell of charcoal and fish and warm bodies. The drive from Ghana was filled with vividness: tall corn stalks growing right up to the edge of the road, clusters of women pounding fufu behind their huts, children in tattered brown and yellow uniforms kicking lopsided soccer balls in knee-high grass.

I was in Togo, West Africa, six thousand miles from Chattanooga, Tennessee, but I didn't need a map to tell me I was a long way from home. I had come with a group of teachers to offer hope and love in the form of lesson plans and school supplies, but what we brought seemed so little up against so much need. That very first week in Togo, the situation seemed bleak.  I couldn’t help wondering how God could reach these people. Here where poverty is a given and only the well-connected have running water and electricity. And what could we do to help? How could our small effort make a difference?

I took another look over the neighborhood. Young women walked below me with water pots and bowls expertly balanced on their heads; men strolled by scraping their teeth with short, clean sticks--Togolese toothbrushes; little girls in brightly colored skirts clapped their slender hands and jumped up and down on skinny legs. In two short weeks of sharing food and laughter with my African friends, the poverty and darkness I first saw had disappeared. Instead, I noticed love: the love of the Togolese believers for one another, for us--their Christian friends from around the world, and for God.

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That first trip to Togo was many years ago, but I still recall the overwhelming love I felt—God’s love for these people I was just getting to know. My first impression of the great love of God extending all the way around the world still comes back to me when I see pictures from far away such as we have enjoyed in the last few weeks at Grace. I love hearing about the many new believers in Ukraine despite the extreme difficulties there, the tiny baby church in Melissa’s Italian town, and the flourishing ministry in Togo. The simple verse we learned as children is a profound truth that I often pass right by: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

God loves the world. This world includes your neighbors and mine. It includes people in Africa and Asia and South America—and all points in between. It even includes the people we don’t like, the perpetrators of war and suffering. I am so glad God loves me tonight. Truly he is a God of unbounded love and grace. Let’s be thankful for that.

--Sherry Poff