The clock struck 4:00 a.m. when the nurses rushed into the room. My wife, Lauren, and I looked at each other with anticipation. In just a few moments, we were going to meet the newest addition to our family. Anyone who has stood in that particular collision of excitement and exhaustion knows the feeling. After a few labored breaths and one last well-placed contraction, we welcomed our fifth daughter into the world. As I stared at Lauren, time seemed to stand still. Then the doctor motioned to us and said something that took us both by surprise.

Several months earlier, Lauren had given me the most shocking, wonderful news of my life. She was pregnant again, but this time, with twins! Joy saturated the weeks that followed, until one evening, she experienced abnormal cramps and bleeding. Since the bleeding had stopped, the doctor's line told us to wait for our scheduled appointment. Prayer was our only defense against the anxiety that followed. As we drove to that appointment, neither of us said much. We didn't need to.

Lying on the table, Lauren gripped my hand as the nurse searched for our daughters' heartbeats. She found one. Strong and steady. She searched for the second and found nothing. On the ultrasound screen was our answer. One daughter moved with vibrant energy while the other lay still, as if frozen in time. Death and life, side by side, on one small screen.

As the months passed and our living daughter, Iris, grew, her sister, Emilie, became harder and harder to find. Our doctor told us that Lauren's body might reabsorb her. But the doctor who delivered Iris at 4:00 a.m. that June morning said otherwise. "In the birthing process," she said, "we discovered the body of your other daughter. Would you like to see her?"

I found myself standing exactly where I had stood months before. Only now it wasn't a monitor in front of me; it was flesh and blood. One daughter rested in her mother's arms, already crying out, already reaching toward the life ahead of her. The other lay still on the medical tray at the foot of the bed. She had never opened her eyes. She had never drawn a breath. I don't have words that fully do justice to that moment. Joy and grief have no business sharing the same breath. They met in mine anyway. I stood there with tears in my eyes, overwhelmed by love for both of my daughters. One who would grow up to know me. One who never would. Two entirely different futures. One undivided love.

I'm still learning what that moment was teaching me. If a flawed man can look at two daughters, one who will spend a lifetime responding to him and one who never could, and feel no difference in his love for either, what does that say about my heavenly Father? Because here's the truth I can't get around: I have been both of those daughters before Him. For decades, I lay spiritually lifeless, giving Him nothing. Now I'm held and known as His child. And in both positions, His love for me has remained exactly the same. Not almost the same. Not mostly the same. Exactly the same.

He didn't wait for me to become something before He loved me. When I was dead in my sin, as lifeless to Him as Emilie was to me in that moment, He looked on me with unwavering love. And when I drew my first breath as a newborn child of God, He looked on me with that same love still. The same is true for you.

Before the foundation of the world, God set His love on you and chose you for Himself (Ephesians 1:4). That was an act of love. Before you ever drew breath, He formed you in the womb, knitting you together in intimate detail (Psalm 139:13–15). That was an act of love. While you were still weak, with nothing to commend you, Christ died in your place (Romans 5:6–8). That was an act of love. And though you weren't merely struggling but dead in your trespasses and sin, God reached into that grave and made you alive together with Christ (Ephesians 2:4–5). That was an act of love.

These acts aren't isolated moments when God decided to be generous. They're expressions of who He is. John, the last apostle still standing, wanted his little children to know this above everything else: "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God… for God is love" (1 John 4:7–8).

Notice what John doesn't say. He doesn't say God loves, as though love were one of several things He does. Love is what He is, down to the root. Now put that beside this: He does not change (Malachi 3:6). If God is love, and God is unchanging, then His love for you isn't a reaction or a reward. It doesn't turn on when you perform and off when you fail. It doesn't rise and fall with your spiritual temperature. It was in that hospital room at 4:00 a.m. It's there on ordinary Tuesdays, and in the moments you were certain no one, not even God, was paying attention. He was. He is.

So when did you last stop, rest, and rejoice in that love? I don't mean as a truth that mattered in the early days of your faith. I mean now, where you are today. Maybe it's the hardest stretch of your life: a sin that won't die, a suffering you didn't choose, a relationship that fell apart, a child you pray for every night, a diagnosis you weren't ready to hear. Or maybe things are good. You just got married, or got the promotion, or bought your first home, or you're counting down the months to retirement. Whichever it is, circumstances come and go like the tide, and His love is being poured out on you in this exact moment. Most of us believe that in theory long before we risk believing it in practice. The real question is whether you believe it enough to rest in it.

When You Can’t Stop Preparing the Speech — Failure

For me, that question sat unconfronted for years. I had vague memories of the early days of my faith, days of real rest in a love I hadn't earned and couldn't lose. But somewhere along the way, that rest got quietly overshadowed. Not by unbelief, but by something subtler.

I was growing. Biblical knowledge. Theological conviction. Ministerial zeal. By every visible measure, I was maturing. And yet underneath it all, different questions had started running on a loop. Am I faithful enough? Effective enough? Why do I feel guilty when my morning reading gets cut short because one of my kids needs me? I knew, scripturally, that this isn't how grace works. I could write the paragraph correcting myself. But some part of me still believed God's favor flowed a little more freely when I had my life in order.

As you read this, there's a strong likelihood that you can relate. You don't feel loved. Not really. Not today. You cry out for grace but don't feel the weight of it landing anywhere. If so, here's what tends to happen next. I tell you, simply, "God loves you." And you agree. Of course you agree. You know your Bible. You'd never say otherwise out loud. But then you try to actually rest in it, and something in you objects. A memory surfaces. A failure you thought you'd worked through. A sin you still haven't let go of. And almost without your noticing, the question shifts. It's no longer whether God loves sinners in general. It's whether He loves you, specifically, right now, in this condition, or whether that love is reserved for some better version of you. What's left after that? Guilt. Insecurity. Sometimes shame.

Wrestling with that question doesn't disqualify you from this love. It means you're exactly the kind of person this love was built for. I imagine the prodigal son wrestled with it too, somewhere on the long road home.

He had taken his inheritance early, burned through every last piece of it, and bottomed out feeding pigs in a foreign country. Then he came to his senses. And on the walk home, you'll recognize what he was doing: preparing a speech. With every step, he drafted an apology, trying to reach some threshold of remorse before he could expect to be received. He had already decided he was no longer worthy to be called a son. He would ask to be a servant instead. We all do this. Before we let ourselves believe this love applies to us, something in us insists on preparing the case first.

But Luke 15:20 says, "The father saw him while he was still a long way off." The father had been watching the road. While his son was rehearsing his apology in a distant country, his father was already looking for him on the horizon. And the moment he appears, the father doesn't stand at the door with arms crossed. He gathers up his robes and runs, a Middle Eastern patriarch running down a dirt road toward a son who smells like a pigsty. The son never gets to finish his speech. The father interrupts him, not with a verdict but with a robe, not with a rebuke but with a ring, not with shame but with celebration: "This son of mine was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found" (Luke 15:24).

The failure didn't disqualify him from his father's love. It became the occasion for that love to run toward him at full speed. That's the love we're talking about. It doesn't cool because of what you said to your spouse in the middle of that argument, or retreat because of what you did in the darkness of your room last night, or waver over a decision to have an abortion all those years ago. It doesn't wait to hear your case. It takes hold of you before you finish the sentence. You don't need the speech. You never did. Turn around, return to your Father, and rest in His love.

When the Pain Feels Like Punishment — Discipline

Few things in the Christian life feel as confusing as the Father's discipline. When consequences arrive, or hardship presses in without explanation, the temptation is immediate: to read the pain as evidence that something has broken between you and God. That the Father who ran down the road for the prodigal has now turned His back.

The writer of Hebrews refuses to let that interpretation stand: "Those whom the Lord loves He disciplines… He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterward it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness" (Hebrews 12:6, 10–11).

Discipline isn't evidence of the Father's distance. In fact, Hebrews argues that the absence of discipline would prove we don't belong to Him at all (Hebrews 12:8). The child who is never disciplined isn't the fortunate one. He's the one whose father has no investment in who he becomes.

As a father of five, this hits home. I have never once lost sleep over the character of a neighbor's child. But I discipline my own children, faithfully and in love, because discipline itself is an act of ownership. It says: this one is mine, and I can't bear to watch her walk toward destruction without doing something about it. My father disciplined me as seemed best to him, with limited human wisdom and patience. But my heavenly Father disciplines me for my good. His wisdom is perfect. His patience is inexhaustible. And His love won't let the discipline stop short of what it needs to produce in me.

This distinction matters. God's discipline isn't punishment in the retributive sense. It isn't the Father making you suffer until a debt is settled. That payment was made at the cross, fully and finally. Discipline is correction aimed at your flourishing. It's the Father's refusal to let you stay where you are when being there is hurting you. It's love applied as heat instead of warmth. The warmth hasn't gone anywhere. The moment just calls for heat.

Hebrews doesn't minimize how it feels. It's sorrowful. But look at what it produces: "the peaceful fruit of righteousness." Peace, not fear or shame. If you're in a season of discipline right now, don't read it as rejection. The Father correcting you is the same Father who chose you, formed you, died for you, and made you alive. He hasn't changed His mind about you. He's simply too committed to your flourishing to leave you undisturbed in your sin, and that commitment is one of the clearest proofs that you belong to Him.

When the Threads Make No Sense — Trials

When was the last time you looked at the back of a tapestry? Humor me for a moment. It isn't pretty. The threads are tangled, knotted, running in directions that seem to have no logic or purpose. Taken on its own, it looks like something went wrong, like whoever is responsible has no idea what they're doing. That's often how we feel when life's trials come.

As a pastor, I spend a significant amount of time in the counseling office, and that chair across from me has heard a thousand stories. Many of the trials people carry through that door are the direct consequences of personal sin. Those conversations are hard, but there's at least a thread of logic to follow.

But then there are the others. The trials that arrive without a return address. The young couple trying to find words for a miscarriage that has left them hollowed out. The wife who discovered her husband's infidelity and is trying to figure out who she is on the other side of betrayal. The believer holding a cancer diagnosis and a question he can barely ask out loud: Where is God in this? The question in that chair is rarely academic. Not "Is God sovereign?" but "Does His love actually reach this room, this diagnosis, this grief?"

That's exactly the question James 1 was written to answer. James opens his letter to a scattered, persecuted band of Christians with one of the most counterintuitive instructions in the New Testament: "Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials" (James 1:2). Not if. When. Trials aren't the unfortunate exception to the Christian life. They're its predictable texture this side of heaven. And James's answer to them, startling as it sounds, is joy.

That isn't manufactured cheerfulness. "Consider" is a deliberate act of the mind. James isn't telling us to feel differently about the trial, but to think rightly about it, "knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance" (James 1:3). Two truths hold together here. God is sovereign over the circumstances; He "works all things after the counsel of His will" (Ephesians 1:11). And as a loving Father, He uses those circumstances for His children's good (Romans 8:28). Marry those truths, and the trial in front of you, however inexplicable, isn't purposeless. It's the Father's hand at work, burning away the dross so that what remains is pure gold. An act of love.

We spend most of our time looking at the back of the tapestry. But the Weaver is working from the front, and what He sees is entirely different. Every dark thread has been placed with intention. And He has never once misguided a thread.

Corrie ten Boom learned to live within this truth. She survived the Ravensbrück concentration camp, imprisoned by the Nazis for sheltering Jewish families. When she spoke about God's purposes in suffering, she would hold up a piece of embroidery and show the back, a tangled jumble of colored threads. Then she would turn it over and reveal the front: a crown. "Although the threads of my life have often seemed knotted," she would say, "I know, by faith, that on the other side of the embroidery there is a crown."¹ That's not denial. It's the testimony of a woman who looked at the underside of her life and chose, by faith, to trust the Weaver. The same Weaver is at work in yours.

When Life Finally Goes Your Way — Blessing

So far, we've traced the Father's love through the cloudy seasons of life. But what about when the sun comes out, when your marriage is thriving, the promotion comes through, and by every visible measure things are going your way?

Before going any further, let me say something that tends to get lost in the rush to be theologically rigorous: your Father delights in this. He isn't a reluctant benefactor dispensing good things with one eyebrow raised. "If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him" (Matthew 7:11).

That can be hard to believe. In my best seasons, I assumed I had done something to deserve them. In my worst, I assumed I had done something to lose them. But the truth is simpler and more staggering than either. You don't have to receive the good seasons with suspicion, wondering if it's too good to be true. Given God's unbroken track record of faithfulness, it's too good not to be true.

But a subtle danger exists even here. In the good seasons, it's easy to collapse your circumstances and God's love into one, so that the promotion becomes the proof that God is for you. When you locate the love in the circumstance rather than in the character of the One who arranged it, you tie your sense of being loved to something fleeting. And when circumstances change, you'll wonder whether the love changed along with them.

A young woman, let's call her "Chloe," came to know this all too well. Surrounded by godly friends, growing in a thriving church, and having just landed her dream job, she thanked God for every ounce of it. Until her friends began dating. As more of them moved toward marriage, other questions surfaced. Is something wrong with me? And then, toward God: Have I done something wrong? Do you really love me? Without knowing it, Chloe had made her circumstances the measure of God's love. When they didn't deliver, the love felt uncertain too.

Maybe the desire is different for you, a child, a restored friendship, a healed body, but the error is the same: when circumstances become the measuring stick of God's love, disappointment is inevitable. The Father's love was never measured by the circumstance to begin with. He is good and does good (Psalm 119:68), because goodness is who He is. And His character doesn't change.

There was a season when I spent a fair amount of time chasing light. In photography, one of the most crucial times of day is golden hour, that narrow window before sunset when the light softens and everything it touches glows. The problem is that it doesn't last. The sun moves, the light dims, the shadows shift. But not so with God. "Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow" (James 1:17). The Creator of the sun doesn't dim. What He is toward you in your darkest season, He is toward you in your brightest one.

Recently, I sat with a coffee on an ordinary morning and looked around at what the Father had given me: my family, the ministry I've been entrusted with, the church I've been placed in. Nothing dramatic had happened. It just took me longer than I'd like to admit to receive it all as coming from Him. That's the posture the good seasons are meant to produce. It isn't a frantic grab at the light before it fades. It's the wide-eyed wonder of a child who looks at what has been set in front of him and knows whose hand put it there. David had it at the height of Israel's blessing: "Who am I, and what is my people…? For all things come from you" (1 Chronicles 29:14). The gift is real. The joy is right. And behind every good thing stands a Father who gives freely, loves completely, and delights in you deeply.

One Undivided Love

I often travel back to that hospital room in my mind. The rush of the nurses. The hum of the machines. All of it is a blur. But then comes the moment when everything stops, and I'm standing there, looking at my two daughters, one resting warmly in her mother's arms, the other lying still on the cold tray. Iris didn't receive more love because she was thriving. Emilie didn't receive less because she wasn't. Two entirely different conditions. Still, one undivided love.

I can't help but see in that moment a glimpse of the Father's love for His children. In seasons of heartbreak, confusion, and crushing struggle, and in seasons of great joy and hard-won victory, His love carries through. It doesn't flicker. It doesn't rise when the season is good or dim when it's hard. It's the same love in every position, undivided and unchanged.

That's the love Paul wanted the Romans to know. A love that neither death nor life, neither things present nor things to come, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate you from (Romans 8:38–39). A love that held you when you were lifeless, ran toward you when you failed, and shaped you when it hurt. A love that delighted in you when life was full and will be there still on the other side of every season yet to come.

Your Father isn't merely committed to you. He rejoices over you with gladness, quiets you with His love, and exults over you with loud singing (Zephaniah 3:17). Not because you earned it or because you've done everything right, but because you are His. That's the Father's love, unwavering, for you. Rejoice in it.