Crazy Love: Obsessed

So I was reading Francis Chan's "Crazy Love" today and I got to the chapter about what it looks like to be obsessed with Christ and a few things jumped out at me.

The first was this quote: "It is just this sort of love that is crazy to the world: true love, a kind found nowhere but through Christ."

And as I read that I realized the depth of that statement.  When you read in the Bible, there are countless examples of who God shows this undying, unchangeable, unmeasurable love for us.  The first is by sending his Son to die. 

This also makes me think of the book Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers. If you have not read this book, I am in no way suggesting it. It's rather...well, mature. But it's a fictional retelling of the story of Hosea.  And when I read this, not only was I reading about the passion that a man had for his harlot wife, but I was reading about the passion that God had for us. We give our hearts away to the little things of this world, constantly finding pleasure in things that will not ultimately satisfy us. And God never gives up on us, he persues us, loves us. Just like Michael pursued and loved Angel in Redeeming Love. We are, like the book of Hosea shows, harlets. We are filthy, unclean, and we are not whole. Not until we find redemption.

We are so unworthy of the love God gives us. But God takes pleasure in us. In all of us. He loves us through our imperfections and fears, and it is better than any love we could ever possibly imagine.  This kind of love looks crazy to the outside world, but to someone who has experienced this love, it is beatiful. It is something to be longed for, yearned for. And to know that God, the Creator of the universe, wants all of us...that is crazy. It's an absolutely crazy love.

The second thing that jumped out at me was this quote: "A person who is obsessed thinks about Heaven frequently. Obsessed people orient their lives around eternity; they are not fixed only on what is here in front of them." 

That seemed so beautiful to me. To have the kind of obsession, that kind of crazy love for God so that all you can think about is spending an eternity with him.  But it not only means we are focused on our own eternity. At least, that's not the way I see it. To me, that says that we should be so obsessed and head-over-heals for our Savior that we want everyone else to experience this crazy and insane love he has for us. We should be so in love with Christ that we want to share that love with everyone around us.

Think about how beautiful life would be if that's how everyone lived. Sharing the truth about God's relentless and crazy love with everyone around them, everyone obsessing over their Creator, their Father, their Lover.

That's crazy.

I was flipping through my bible in church Sunday when I came across this verse. Psalm 116:15, "Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints."  It was circled in a turqouise pen, which meant one thing: I had found and circled that verse shortly after Virginia died. I was thinking about why I would have circled it when I thought about what a saint was. 
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Dictionary.com defines saint as this:
1. any of certain persons of exceptional holiness of life
OR
2. a person of great holiness, virtue, or benevolence

I remembered that I read this verse and thought of Virginia because she lived a life of great holiness.  She lived a life worth copying, and she lived a life glorifying to her Savior. I loved reading this verse and thinking of Virginia as "precious in the sight of the Lord" because it reminded me that even though here we are grieving, God is being glorified and delighted by his creation in the perfected form in which she was meant to be.