extravagant love

Extravagant love is never wasted.

Someone said those words to me the other day, after I had offered them a look at a few messy and delicate details of my story.

“It sounds like your story is one big opportunity to receive grace,” they affirm.

I breathe in a sigh of safety.

The weightiness of their simple words has stuck to me like heavy-duty painters’ tape in the reconstruction zone of my never-expected-to-be-here-now life.

Extravagant love rescues. Extravagant love invites. It doesn’t waste, it doesn’t shame, it doesn’t imprison. Extravagant love sets us free to take our scars and limps and bruises and to run in wide open spaces with a purpose.

Jesus embodied extravagant love beyond our wildest of wild imaginations when He bled and died and resurrected. Implausible rescue. That kind of love simply doesn’t go about wasting.

And you know, the dusty details of my story don’t matter nearly as much as the big idea that I’d shout from rooftops and mountaintops and lots of places in-between: Jesus is rescuing me.

My mental calendar is marked with some Big Rescue Days. But day after day after day, Jesus keeps rescuing me in little ways—with extravagant love.

Some days, a lot of days, I wander like the Israelites after they escaped Egypt’s bondage. Rescue isn’t easy. It aches. I’m weary of being weary. I see all of the it’s-not-supposed-to-be-this-way bullet points, and I decide it’s better to hide.

Forget hope. I can’t do this anymore.

Then I remember the rescue. I feel the rescue. I see the rescue. I refuse to believe that a Jesus so kind and so good would waste His extravagant love, and so I refuse to waste it either.

The pain Jesus gave me the grace to survive can’t be meaningless or purposeless. If He’s lifting me to stand on my feet again, then whoa baby, I’m believing in faith it’s for more than just a reason, it’s for a full-of-life adventure, a story that only He could be so creative to write.

So here I am, trying to believe that every one of my dark days is another chapter in the rescue story—the one I’m gonna keep telling.

Extravagant love . . . yeah, that’s the good stuff.