Greater love has no one than this:
to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
—John 15:13
Lloyd Ogilvie, U.S. Senate Chaplain (1995–2003), told about an eight-year-old girl in an orphanage who had been terribly abused. She was understandably distant and defensive. She had no friends, not one.
A supervisor was informed that the girl had hidden a note in a tree outside the stone wall surrounding the campus. She retrieved it, read it, and wept.
The note, scrawled with a crayon, said, “To whoever finds this, I love you.” The child so desperately wanted to connect with someone who would love her that she went outside the walls of the institution and left that note on a tree
Enemies of Jesus took him outside the walls of Jerusalem and nailed him to a tree. A note on that tree has your name on it: “To whoever finds this, I love you.”
Our feelings come and go.
Jesus’ love comes but never goes.