You could try it — when you lean your body way to the left, or when you lean way to the right, sooner or later you’re bound to fall.
And inside of every single person walking on God’s globe, there beats this heart with a very bad lean to it.
Our love didn’t lean toward the one real God, with His arms wide open…..Our love leaned toward these selfish things that we made into our own fake gods — these little idols that have no real arms at all, so when we lean toward them, we just fall. Hard.
God looked at all the hearts leaning away from Him, and His bruised heart swelled with sadness. “His heart was filled with pain” is how God felt when he looked around and saw everyone sinning and leaning and hurting (Genesis 6:6, NCV). God’s tears fell like a flood.
His heart hurts not just with a few teardrops of ache, not just with a slow drip of a bit of sadness — no the whole gigantic enormity of God’s heart swells wore with what hurts your heart — and His tears of sadness flooded the world.
God leans to us who are falling in a hurting world, and He catches us. He whispers, “I love you…” God’s love for you made Him weep over all our sadness and sin, and His heart filled with ache and spilled like a flood. And God offered everyone a gift, a rescue, a massive wooden ark — an ark much like a cradle on water — and He whispered, “Come to the ark.”
God sees our tears now. And the hurt flooding our world right now. And He offers everyone the greatest gift — a rescue, a wooden cradle, a wooden cross — and He whispers, “Come to Jesus.” Noah and his family were saved by an ark. You and the whole family on this earth are saved by Jesus alone.
Some horrible, awful, miserable, very bad days, you may look around and say, “If there’s a God who really cares, He’d look at our world, and His heart would break.” And God looks to Jesus, who went to the cross, that real tree, and says, “Look — My heart did break.”
While Jesus hung on that cross, soldiers speared His side, as if they were piercing straight into Jesus’ heart, filled with sadness for all the world’s pain, and it was like the water and blood of His broken heart gushed right out — like a flood of…..love.
So when those floods of bad things happen, if you lean toward Jesus — if you incline toward Jesus, if you rest in Jesus — you get the Gift of Jesus, like an ark of love, holding you, carrying you, raising you gently up through any flood of sadness that fills the world.
— from Ann Voskamp’s Unwrapping the Greatest Gift: A Family Celebration of Christmas
Little Flatrock Christian Church 
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