When you know that I love you, and you know that love means to obey God willingly, then God's joy will be in us and we are new and different people. But we have a problem with God's love. The Irish poet and wit, Oscar Wilde once said that there was enough suffering in any London lane to show God's love is fancy not fact. Say it after the winter floods have roared through the Town of Durham, or down the Red River leaving behind a vast wake of devastation with people wiped out and homeless. Now love has the language of touch in it.
Love has to work hard to keep people from harm's way.
In Durham, and along the Red River Valley from Grand Forks to Selkirk, people prayed that there would be deliverance from the onrushing waters, prayed while they sand-bagged, and built dikes with a fury. The water has come, and the devastation is mind boggling, heart rending, and total. Floods the likes of which we have never seen before. With a Christ and a cross, that's how, with a death as wretched as anyone has died, with a silence deep and lonely as human grief - deeper. God is love.