Now Playing: Some random rap song Keith found on YouTube.

I've been trying to teach Laura how to make paper cranes this afternoon. My mother is baking the turkey for tomorrow, and two fat loaves of challah bread that Laura made earlier are sitting on the dining room table.

Psalm 36, trying to explore the love of God. One way to battle unbelief is to think about His love in concrete ways.

5 Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds.
6 Your righteousness is like the mountains of God; your judgments are like the great deep; man and beast you save, O Lord.
7 How precious is your steadfast love, O God! The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
8 They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights.
9 For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.

God's love is infinite and overarching. It is a love that is transcendent, superior to any love on earth, while still touching the earth. His love is steadfast, like the mountains, and also like the mountains, in some ways terrifying. C.S. Lewis beautifully describes angels in Perelandra as exemplifying the pure intense charis of God, an intensity resulting from its purity, its sovereignty, its immensity. In some ways this is the redemption of the Romantic idea of the sublime that Burke and Kant talk about: God's love is frightening in its immensity and hugeness, in the fact that it makes us as human beings realize our smallness, our helpless, our inability to love in a way at all comparable.

This love is not without purpose, though. God's love would be terrifying because of its transcendence and sovereignty since we cannot and will not choose to reflect it, but it is channeled into redemption, David says. Not only redemption of human beings, but redemption of creation, "man and beast". His love has chosen to manifest itself sovereignly by flowing through creation instead of judging fallen creation for its inability to reflect that love. C.S. Lewis again writes about the "joy" that happens when the infinite, simply for love, rejects all other possibilities for the one on which His choice has settled. Here that choice is salvation, into which God has amazingly directed all the power of His will.

This makes God's love precious, valuable, weighty. This also makes His love safe, a place of refuge. In this love human beings can find rest and protection, complete security. There is no anger remaining for sins in the past. In the face of His love I can acknowledge my vulnerability and need and find rest.

Not only is His love protecting, but it is satisfying. David speaks of God's love as food and drink, satisfying and refreshing. In Christ nothing else will satisfy or should satisfy. Christ Himself is our abundance, the meal that we eat and drink. This means peace for the future and peace for the present, energy to love those around me.

God's love gives truth, gives direction, gives light. By God's love I can measure all other loves, see all other lights in light of His light. Light also gives freedom from fear: in the light I can confront the things that terrify me and see them for what they are. Since His love is my refuge, I have a safe place from which to confront sin and straight sight with which to confront that sin, to see it for what it is. Then His love gives the energy, the satisfaction, the food and drink, with which to combat that sin.

So I pray this for those I know:

10 Oh, continue your steadfast love to those who know you, and your righteousness to the upright of heart!