There are two kinds of love – “big love” and “small love.”  People say, “I love you.”  They mean it, usually.  But how much do they love you?  Is it a casual love – like an acquaintance who appreciates what you do?  Or a deep love that goes beyond what you do or what you think to love your very soul?

There’s nothing wrong with casual love in the general sense of life.  We appreciate the people around us and love them and what they do.

The trouble comes if we only have casual-love relationships in our lives.  We will always be searching for something more – because while people love us and we love others, it’s little more than a surface-deep love: usually based on what people do or their personality rather than on them as a person.

We were created to feel love deeply, to accept love deeply, to give love deeply.  When we deny that need in our lives, we will strive to fulfill ourselves with anything and everything else (even with the big love of God that we feel in the wilderness).  Sometimes there simply isn’t anyone in our life that can or should love us that deeply.  Other times, the love is there, but we are fearful to accept it.

The deep love – or as I like to call it, “big love” – is the kind that God speaks of when He says that He has loved, “with an everlasting love” (Jeremiah 31:3), that “God is love and in Him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).  The love of God is always big love.  He doesn’t love us casually or only because of what we do or our personality.  He loves us – the reality of who we are that goes beyond what we might do or say or try to be.

Let God love you with His big love.  Don’t limit yourself based on what you do or don’t do; by your past or your viewpoint of life.  God will always love with big love -I wonder if He even has the capacity for casual love.  His love is so infinite that it’s always big, always deep, always more real than the realist love we’ve ever known.