One Billion Love Letters to You

“I love you, Lord, and I lift my voice . . .” I hummed and sang to myself, holding back my tears. I put one foot in front of the other, climbing the steps that were wedged between the library and Patterson Hall on the way across my college campus. “. . . to worship you, Oh my soul, rejoice . . .”

My soul didn’t feel like rejoicing. 

It was my second year of college, and my boyfriend and I had just broken up. 

I could see the breakup coming and frankly had seen it coming for over a year, but just when I felt ready to call it quits, something he’d say would renew my hope that the relationship would make a turn in the right direction. 

I prayed fervently that the Lord would change his heart and make him love the Lord. 

I longed to share this burgeoning faith with my boyfriend, the man I hoped to marry, so I prayed that something would change. 

If only he would love Jesus the way I loved Jesus, then we could get married and move to the coast and buy a golden retriever and spend our days sitting on a very romantic front porch swing with babies, lots and lots of babies.

Instead, my boyfriend fell out of love with me. “I don’t know what happened,” he told me. “I just don’t love you anymore. I want to, but I don’t.”

I knew what happened. God had answered my prayer. God had released me from a relationship I wasn’t strong enough to release myself from.

Singing My Way into Believing

“Take joy my King, in what you hear,” I continued, running through the praise song I’d chosen as my mantra to chase away the thoughts of my ex-boyfriend. “May it be a sweet, sweet sound in your ear.”

It’s been over twenty years since that young woman wept her way in grief across her college campus, humming and singing to herself to try to redirect her broken heart back to God. According to the Bible she so recently began reading, that God promised to love her with an everlasting love, a love so much better, so much stronger, and so much deeper than the shallow love she’d been swimming in for almost two years. 

It was a love that promised to woo her into his presence. 

It was a love that promised to be patient and kind. 

It was a love that promised to give her back her vineyards and restore her hope. 

It was a love that promised to hold her, even when she was difficult, sad, anxious, or afraid. 

It was a love that promised to never fall out.

I could read those promises in the Bible, but as a relatively new follower of Christ, I had no confidence yet that God would live up to them. Nineteen-year-old Sarah couldn’t conceive of a love so high or wide or deep or long. 

But I had sung about it in church and college ministry services, on the radio and in my dorm room. And I had glimpsed it, in my religion professor and his wife, in older couples who held Bible studies and opened their homes to doe-eyed college students, in a stream of people who believed in something that gave them stronger footing than I had. 

That something, I had learned, was God’s love. God’s love was the foundation they were able to trust in every storm—cancer diagnoses, car accidents, lost loved ones, career changes, and more—nothing seemed to be able to rock that love.

Finding the Golden Thread of God’s Love

Over the last two decades, my understanding of the promise of God’s love has deepened, and widened, and stretched, and strengthened. It has held me through four miscarriages, challenging seasons of marriage, my mother’s cancer diagnosis, parenting woes, work crises, and chronic illness. In and out of every season, his love was tested and remained true.

When God wooed me into his presence at eighteen, I had no idea that being there could be so good. The more God drew me to him, the more beautiful and wonderful and bountiful his love became—I could see it around me, more and more, everything given from his love, all of creation poured forth from that love.

And I get to be a part of it. And you get to be, too. All it took was trusting in the possibility of that much love. Trusting that God, who is Love, knit the whole universe together with his love, even you, especially you. When you believe that all of creation is held together in and through and for Christ, who is love incarnate, nothing can knock you down, not even death.

Writing this now makes me weep with gratitude and joy. It makes me sing anew, “I love you, Lord, and I lift my voice,” because that song and those words are so much more real and true than the shadow of hope they were when I was nineteen, grief-stricken and afraid that no one would ever love me again. 

God’s Constant and Reassuring Love Notes

When I have been unsure if God’s love is trustworthy, if God’s love is for me, if God’s love is even real, it has been as if God has sent a little love note, passed across the classroom of the universe.

When I opened that first one in college, it was as if he said:

Look, I have been loving you for such a long, long time. You don’t have eyes to see it yet. 

You think you are rotten. 

You think you are broken.

 You think you are unworthy of my love. 

You aren’t even sure if such a love could exist. 

But one day, it will be made clear to you just how much I have woven myself into the fabric of your very existence.

 One day, you will look back on all of the days that came before and see the golden thread of my love shimmering in every high and low, stretching between you and every creature and created thing in the universe. 

Then you will know, even as you are known. 

For now, just have a little faith in me. 

Try to trust that this love is for you. 

This love is for you.

Songs, Bible verses, all of creation, and centuries and centuries of people’s stories are one billion love letters from a not-so-distant King, one billion love letters to me, one billion love letters to you.

Today, we live in the same town where I attended college all those years ago, and my daughter is a freshman on the same campus. We often walk together and talk about what she’s experiencing, how the roots of her faith are digging deeper as she seeks the Source of Living Water that can sustain her through the latest challenges she’s facing. As we climb the steps between the library and Patterson Hall, I find myself humming again, “I love you, Lord . . . ” I find myself passing on a word from the Bible to encourage her. I tell her about the ex-boyfriend, the stairs, the song, and the ways God has fulfilled his promises to me, then, now, still, forever.

And my soul rejoices.

—Written by Sarah M. Wells. Used by permission from the author.