If you read this enough you know that I have been tempted to turn our praise team into a David Crowder cover band. So you might not be surprised to read that I was tempted on Sunday morning to add “How He Loves” (actually written by John Mark McMillan and covered by DC*B) to our praise service set list. Although I am here in Colorado, my family and friends in New Jersey were very much on my mind as we worshiped Sunday morning. The church I grew up in and the last church I served before moving to Colorado both had canceled worship as they waited for Hurricane Irene to pass over them about the time of their regularly scheduled worship.
I wanted to sing “How He Loves” because it opens with, “He is jealous for me / loves like a hurricane / I am a tree / bending beneath the weight of his wind and mercy.” I didn’t because I was afraid of being misunderstood as trying to be “cute.” That wasn’t the point though.
Saturday morning my daughter and I were tracking Irene, and we found this picture taken from the Space Station that said the storm was 100 kilometers wide. We noted that at one point the northern tip of Irene was just south of NJ and the other end was just north of South Carolina. I started to try to put that into categories my middle schooler could understand by saying it would take almost all day to drive that far.
“Loves like a hurricane…” Love that’s 100 miles wide. Love that is overwhelming. Love that no matter how hard we try we just cannot avoid. Love that will disrupt our lives if we let it. Love that envelops us. The love of God.