The Love of God
Posted: Friday, July 24, 2009
by Jean Purcell
OpineBooks.com
Eugenia Price, a Christian writer once high-rolling in New York City and careless about God, wrote many fiction and nonfiction books after her conversion.
The most powerful to me were her historical fictions, stories of real people, some wealthy and from the northeastern U. S., who moved to and helped shape the states of Georgia and Florida.
When I first woke up to the truth about Jesus, I went through days and weeks in a kind of shock. I knew I was unworthy of such divine and awesome love and acceptance. For a while I told hardly anyone of what had happened. Yet, I wanted to tell the world about the love of God, and what He can and does do!
I began going back to church shortly before I made a full commitment to Christ, with nothing more held apart from Him. There, two unmarried, older sisters befriended me. Soon after, one learned that I had finally found complete peace within myself and was writing again. She suggested, "You should read St. Simons Memoir."
"What's that?" I asked.
"It's about a writer's life!" she responded with eyes sparkling.
I bought and read that book, and a few years later my husband and I went near St. Simons for two weeks, staying across a bridge at another island that was relatively undeveloped. We took a few C. S. Lewis books with us. My husband was reading Mere Christianity, and I revisited the pages of St. Simons Memoir. It felt heavenly to my husband and me, with long walks, privacy in a large condo, good meals nearby, and quiet talks.
All of those things, we knew, were directly from God's love, His amazing grace, the saving work of the Holy Spirit that brought us into an understanding of Jesus that neither of us had ever known.
Since those days, the love of God has led our lives. We have had our plans changed often and have gone where we never thought we could go. Whatever has happened, up or down, God has been faithful, and always will be, as we continue with Him.
Jesus is even more wonderful to me than ever! On earth, He showed a uniquely wonderful life, this perfect, sinless Son of God. He endured our human frailties and earth's limitations due to sin and confinements of time and space, with perfect love. He walked hundreds of miles and more along dusty roads, had no home to call his own, lived and worked and crossed waters with limited people, whether they were Jew, Samaritan, Roman, or whatever. Everything He did, thought, saw, heard, said, taught, preached, and prayed was led by the love of God! He was perfect, obedient to the Father in vital power.
Let us never forget that from the cross of crucifixion Jesus prayed for His enemies, His crucifiers and those who rejoiced at His death, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." We are not equipped to measure the depths, heights, and breadths of the compassion of such love, the love of God in Christ!
This is front page top headline news every day! The love of God, the love of God. How great is the love of God!
John, the apostle, on the Isle of Patmos wrote, "Even so, Lord Jesus, come quickly." Those words come at the end of divine Scripture. In the twinkling of the eye it will happen, His long-awaited return.
A year after Eugenia Price's death on St. Simons in 1996, my husband and I revisited St. Simons and the church there that was featured in her books. Jim's mother, Mary Helen, was with us. Another encourager of my writing, she rejoiced when my first book about what God can and will do was published that year, by the grace and help of God.
We walked among the centuries' old graves in the church cemetery. My husband held his mother's arm, for she was already almost totally blind. I could hear her now and then asking, "Do you see it? Has Jean found it?"
At another part of the cemetery, my steps went toward a gigantic oak, a "great live oak" of the kind Ms Price often placed in her stories. Directly under a large, long, lower branch was a modest gravestone, flat and embedded in the earth. It marked her grave.
Days of learning faith, a church, two older Christian ladies, the mention of a book about writing, years of trusting God and learning more about Him, longing to draw closer, battling doubts and periods of dryness, finding God faithful in everything, at all times-all and more circled in the air there, at that grave of a lost woman found and redeemed.
What a peaceful place and moment that was for the three of us for whom Eugenia Price's writing and life had become very familiar. The soul of the author had gone peacefully to the Life Beyond, with Jesus. And so will all who trust the Lord. And so will all who accept God's salvation now through the wonderful, living Lord. He enables men and women to live more than they can dream apart from Him.
The love of God. The love of God. May no one miss this eternal mark of the high calling of Jesus Christ. Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus. Amen.
(c) 2009 Jean Purcell
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Top-level comments on this article: (2 total)hi jean,all that you have written is the reason i am still sitting here. i chose to believe in God, and what He thought best for me, even if I didn't know the reasons why. i knew He was much smarter than I, and i tried to get through each problem with a mutual solution.life would be barren to me without the belief that my Father above loves and cares for me, and what is best for me, and sometimes, intercepts when i cannot see for myself.thanks for sharing this with us,my best to you,sueDear Sue,
What I enjoy at the top of enjoyment and thanks with your articles are your many ways of pointing to who God is and what He means to you.
We share this undeserved awareness that without Him we would be nowhere, although we might think and believe we were really somewhere. I thank God all the time for His work of grace in opening my eyes and heart and mind to Himself, and to accept Jesus, the one I was most afraid or reluctant to try to know.
Increasing blessings to you, friend,
Jean
Wonderful article, Jean. Very deep, one of the few times where I find myself without words.Thank you.Hi, Ken,
Thank you so much for letting me know. Thanks and praise to the Lord for His love and help to us.
Blessings,
Jean
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