Our love for God and others is but an echo of God’s resounding love for us. When our love seems to be waning, there is a good chance that we have not positioned ourselves in place to hear the sound waves of His love well.

I attended a small, private liberal arts college in the Southeast. Our campus was quaint, boasting a tiny puddle of a pond by the theater building. Supposedly the architect who made the building also created this one spot in the theater courtyard where if you stood at just the right place you could create an echo. I tried time after time with friends, usually as a procrastination method or a way to assuage early evening boredom.  I never did find the sweet spot, leading me to the conclusion that either the whole thing was a myth or I was spatially challenged.

While studying Paul’s first letter written to a young church in Thessalonica this week, a phrase by MacLaren, one of my favorite commentators, reminded me of my sad attempts to find the right spot to hear the echo.

“My love is the reverberation of the primeval voice, the echo of God’s…So my love answers God’s love, and it will never answer it unless faith has brought me within the auditorium, the circle wherein the voice that proclaims ‘I love thee, my child,’ can be heard.” 

The Cross of Christ is the best place, the sweetest spot, to hear most clearly God’s resounding, reverberating love for us. When we earnestly at the foot of the Cross, whether in brokenness, in neediness or in guiltiness, the sound waves of His costly love spill all around us.

I wish that I could say that my soul is daily filled with the sounds waves of His love; however, practically speaking, I do not often find my soul eagerly listening at the Cross. As hard as it is to admit, I more readily find myself at the hills of performance, listening for the spotty sound waves of human love, than positioned permanently at the hill of Golgotha.

I cannot echo what I do not first hear and receive. As such, over time, my love for God and others weakens until it is becomes nearly inaudible.  Rather than being a loud trumpet of the good news, I become an empty vessel, desperate for words of love and life.

Recognizing my emptiness, I find myself back at the place of the Cross where His love screams most loudly.

The sounds waves of His love penetrate far more deeply than the even the deepest frequencies of human love. I have a desperate need to visit my echo spot more often, to linger there longer.

May we hear His love so loudly that our echoes of that love might more fill an empty world.