Do you know how loved you are?

I’ll jump in here and answer: you don’t. I don’t know either. The truth is, I am loved far beyond my wildest imagination and outside of my understanding.

A couple of years ago I was deep in prayer and worship and God gave me a vision. Jesus and I were walking in a walled garden. He led me to an arched window opening in the garden wall. It looked out over a vast, blue ocean. There was no land in sight, just sparkling water and blue skies as far as the eye could see.

“Do you know what this is?” Jesus asked me.

“No,” I replied.

“This ocean is my love for you. You think that my love for you is finite and that it has limits. But it will never run out and never run dry. You think my love for you is like a glass of cold water on a hot day; but really, it’s more like an ocean that is wild and huge and infinite. You can submerge yourself entirely in my love for you. You will never find the bottom or the end of my love.”

When you’ve been created by a God who IS love, it is your destiny to BE loved. Love is coded in your very DNA because you’ve been made in His image. He IS love.

I wrestled with this in the summer of 2013. I spent two months in bed, unable to care for my children. I was paralyzed with a potential diagnosis that could mean a lifetime in bed or in a wheelchair. I remember lying in bed one day, asking God how he could even love me if I couldn’t do anything for Him. And then, for the first time in my life, I tangibly felt a wave of his love engulf me and I could hear Him speak to my heart, “Courtney, if you spend the rest of your life in this bed, I won’t love you any more or any less. Nothing you could do could possibly make me love you more or less. You have my love and you have my heart, just being YOU.”

I used to think that getting miraculously healed was proof of God’s love. Which sounds great when you are healed, but what if you aren’t healed yet? What if your emotions are in the dumps and you don’t feel loved? Years later, as I was struggling with depression, I asked the Lord for proof that He loved me, and He led me straight to 1 John 4:9-10:

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. - Romans 5:8

There it was, in black and white. The proof of his love I’d been looking for: before I’d ever even heard of Him, Jesus Christ died for me. So when my emotions are low and things are swirling around me, I have this truth to fall back on:

This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. - 1 John 4:9-10

I was loved before I ever heard His name. So were you. It’s a vast, unending ocean of love that didn’t just end with his death on the cross. Even as Jesus lives on, after his resurrection, so his love lives on; and so do I, in Him.