Wider Than My Record

Ephesians 3:18–19

One bankruptcy. Two divorces. Three seasons lost to addiction. Four times behind the gates at Changi.

I have carried that arithmetic for most of my adult life. For years I read it the way a creditor reads a statement — line by line, and always in the red. And I assumed God read it the same way. I believed in His sovereignty. I simply imagined it as something high and judicial, a bench I was standing before, a verdict already reached about a man who kept making the wrong call.

What I could not do was see love in the wreckage. Love was for people whose lives ran straight.

Something shifted when I sat properly with Paul’s prayer. Look at where the man is when he writes it. He is a prisoner. He is telling the Ephesians not to lose heart over his sufferings — he is comforting the people on the outside. And he does not pray for the door to open. He prays that they would have the strength to grasp how wide and long and high and deep the love of Christ is: a love with no measurable edges, one that surpasses knowledge even as you stand inside it.

That was written by a man in chains. So the love he describes is not a reward for a tidy life. It is what holds you when your life is anything but.

I first met that love in a prison Bible study, in a room I had no business being in, through a mentor who kept turning up for me long after the sensible thing was to give up. God’s sovereignty was never the bench. It was the carrying. It was the arms underneath me in the years I could not carry myself.

I say this to the boys in TCE most weeks, and I mean it as a promise rather than a slogan: you cannot out-measure it. You cannot exhaust it with your record. My record has dimensions — I can count them, and I do. His love does not.

Our souls ache for fairness, for a world without wrong choices and irreparable damage. This side of glory we will not get it. What we are given instead is a love that surpasses knowledge, and with it, peace enough to move forward.

Soli Deo Gloria