Consuming fire

"When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man; not that He has a disinterested because really indifferent concern for our welfare, but that in awful and surprising truth, we are the object of His love. You asked for a loving God, you have one. The great Spirit you so lightly invoked, the Lord of terrible aspect, is present. Not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests; But the Consuming Fire Himself-The Love that made the worlds, persistent as an artists love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know. It passes reason to explain how any creatures-not to say creatures such as we-should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes. It is certainly a burden of Glory not only beyond our deserts, but also, except in rare moments of Grace, beyond our desire." C.S. Lewis, The Problem Of Pain

Father, how can I answer Your love with anything other than adoration? How can I call anything I receive from Your hand, be it joy, pain, blessing, hardship, or anything in between, any at all but a direct outflow of your passionate consuming love for me? This diluted bilge we pass to one another and call love has only a taste of the burning you have for us. There are no words in our language to describe your desire, and if we spent generations writing poems defining ever more intense adjectives, we could still only scratch the surface. It is the kind of love that makes men go mad, that makes women give their lives, that makes children grow still and silent and old men dance and sing like toddlers. It is the love that drove You to kneel down in Gethsemane and pray for strength rather than running to hide from Your executioners, that made You still Your holy hands beneath the nails. Your love for us is complete, Father-it has won. There is no wound it cannot heal, no life it cannot touch, if only we will be the bearers of it.
Father, make me a vessel of Your consuming, burning Love. Let it destroy me until only You remain.