Thinking about the topic of our current series, The Misunderstood God, I started to reflect on the sometimes complicated nature of relationships.

I noticed, for example, that my love for my children is something I instinctively want to hide from them. The immensity and intensity of it makes it somehow too much to reveal, if only for their own protection. How can my son even begin to comprehend that I love him more than life itself? How will he deal with the truth that even when I am acting nonchalant and busy, in the corner of my eyes, I am constantly aware of his every move, sensitive to every shift in the tone of his voice, that even as I act restrained, his triumphs engulf me in joy far greater than any joy I've known from my own triumphs, and that his setbacks burn a painful hole into my heart?

For his own protection, for his own autonomy and emotional space, I need to veil my love for him, hide it, make it a matter of his own searching. This seems to me to be the appropriate way for fallen man to express love, the oblique way in which we must handle love, or anything else sacred and bright.

Maybe this is why God's love for us can't be fully known this side of heaven. Maybe God's love, to fallen man, is too much to know directly and all at once. Maybe it has to remain like an unexplored wilderness--the vastness and depth of which we know only through imagination, only through faith, only through humble exploration, mapping out our winding trails through small portions of that endless forest.

1 Corinthians 13:12, "Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known."