alive.

"What is it that makes you feel most alive?"

My friend asked me this at dinner last night. It didn't take me long to answer her. I have, after all, been thinking about it for almost a year now.

What makes me feel most alive?

I feel most alive when I feel the love of God flowing. When He pours His love into me through His word, through the beauty of His creation, through the love other people have for me. And when His love flows through me into the lives of the people He has placed around me.

That is when I feel the most alive.

Why?

To live is to know God (John 17:3). And love, for God and for His people, is the sign that I have truly passed from the death of separation from God into the life of joy that comes with knowing Him and walking in His Presence (1 John 3:14, Psalm 16:11). As John Piper says in Desiring God, love is simply the overflow of joy in God.

That is why I feel the most alive when I feel the love of God flowing. That is when I am most alive: most aware of His life in me and His Presence with me and His joy and love flowing through me.

***

“Love [is the most powerful force in the universe]….There is nothing more powerful, more radical, more transformational than love. No other source or substance or force. And do not be deceived, for it is all of these things, and then some! Often folks like to dismiss it as a mere emotion, but it is far more than that. It can’t be circumscribed by our desires or dictated by the whim of our moods. Not the Great Love of the Universe, as I like to call it. Not the Love that set everything in motion, keeps it in motion, which moves through all things and yet bulldozes nothing, not even our will. Try it. Just try it and you’ll see. If you love that Great Love first, because It loved you first, and then love yourself as you have been loved, and then love others from that love…Wow! Bam! Life without that kind of faith – that’s death. Therein lies the great metaphor…Life without faith is death. For life, as it was intended to be, is love. Start loving and you’ll really start living. There is no other force in the universe comparable to that.”

~Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford: A Memoir, pp. 128-129