If only I could grasp this...

From my prayer journal today:

Thank you that You love and care for us so tenderly. I'm amazed that you love each person on this earth with depth, tenderness, and passion. With love that surpasses understanding- deeper than any love I'll ever be able to feel in my human heart. A God-Sized love.

Thank you that you love the dirty, the stinky, the odd looking, the deformed, the disabled, those involved in religions of deception, those involved in the ugliest of sins, the homosexuals, the prostitutes, the murderers...my heart can't even fully grasp a smidgen of such overwhelming, overshadowing, otherworldly love.

I ask that through the power of your Holy Spirit you would infuse my heart, spirit, mind, and soul with some sort of comprehension and resemblance of this love, and that you would love the world through me, that they would know your Spirit. Change my heart to Your heart, that my first reaction to these people wouldn't be to flinch, ignore, or turn away; but that it would feel YOUR compassion, weep with Your heart, and reach out in Your love.

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge--that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us,to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

Ephesians 3:14-21