There’s a line in the movie “Meet Joe Black” that is perhaps one of the most profound statements about love ever made.
The movie is about death taking a holiday and visiting earth. In the movie, death is personified in human form and played by Brad Pitt. Death’s motivation throughout the story is to learn from a wise man played by Anthony Hopkins. But while he shadows Hopkins’ character, death ends up falling in love with Hopkins’ daughter – or at least, he thinks he does. He’s not quite sure how to define what it is he feels for the woman, and as he tries to sort it out and discover the true meaning of love, he begins to ask the advice of others in the world. Toward the end of the movie, he finds himself in a conversation with a character named Quince – a doofus of a man who bumbles along through the movie as a character you’d easily dismiss as the comedic humor of the story. But it’s Quince who delivers the line of the film. It plays out like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwBAYK66grA
Joe Black (AKA Death): But … Allison loves you? (Allison is Quince’s wife)
Quince: (nods his head in affirmation)
Joe Black: How do you know?
Quince: Because she knows the worst thing about me … and it’s OK.
Joe Black: What is it?
Quince: It’s not any one thing. It’s just an idea. It’s like you know each other’s secrets – your deepest, darkest secrets. … and then you’re free! You’re free to love each other completely … totally! Just, no fear. So there’s nothing you don’t know about each other … and it’s OK.
I love this line because it reminds me of the way God loves us. Romans 8:38-39 says it even better than Quince does.
“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
You see, God knows the worst things about us … and he still loves us. It’s OK because the kind of love God has for us is so much more than a feeling – it’s a choice. It’s THE choice. It’s been THE choice from the very beginning. It’s been THE choice that has ruled over everything for all of time. When God created the earth and all its beings, He saw it as good. And then he made man, and it was good. And then man sinned and it was the opposite of good.
God made, in that moment, the ultimate choice. Instead of scrapping his creation as a failed experiment – wadding up earth into a little ball and throwing it into the trash bin in the corner of his office up in Heaven – he CHOSE to love us. He saw the worst things about us, and HE CHOSE TO LOVE US!
Do you realize how valuable that makes you? Do you realize what that means about how God sees you? Do you realize, as Quince did, how profound that kind of love is?
Because of that love – that love that was perfected through Jesus – we are free! We’re free to love God and each other completely … totally! Just, no fear! With that kind of love ruling over everything, there’s nothing that can ever separate us from God.
c3oneword.wordpress.com 