unconditional love.

Unconditional love.

We promise it.

As if we could control it or offer it as a gift – all tidy and sweet in a box, wrapped up in brown paper and a jute bow.

Unconditional love.

I heard it in lovely vows at a recent wedding.

An impossible ideal.

And as I mature and stand witness to the world aging beneath my feet

I keep looking and I keep trying

but I keep finding myself empty-handed

and a regular failure at this task that shouts at me and whispers to me through every movie and novel and relationship.

Unconditional.

I don’t even have a path to that height.

And maybe, maybe, I am not supposed to.

Maybe it’s the just out of reach nature of unconditional love that God wants us to run smack dab into – hard as the concrete wall I backed my Suburban up against.

The unflinching reality of all that we cannot accomplish in our own hearts, of our own strength, through our own might.  Even though we often romantically think we can.

Robert Browning, a classic romantic, once wrote, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp – or what’s a heaven for?”

I think sometimes it is precisely the impossible of which God wants to reminds us.

The impossible without Him.

And unconditional love is one of the most ludicrous ideas apart from a God who holds our hand and says, Follow Me.  Love like this.