When I look at my children foster, biological or through friendships, my attention has been called to a great mystery. These children did not, could not have loved me first. My son could not have loved me first. I had to love him enough to conceive him with my wife and then nurture them both through the pregnancy. My foster children do not love me first. Sometimes they come into the home down right hating me and everything that is happening. Yet because I first love them eventually there is a measure of love found there, even if they would not admit it. What about my kids that are not blood or family? I would still claim them as my own! I first love them. They have the least reason to love me. If I treated them harshly or was vile towards them they would simply not interact with me. Yet in my love and friendship with their parents they reciprocate. I love all these children even though they themselves can be vile, hurtful, full of rage or disrespectful. Even though their needs drain my bank account and free time, I still love them. Consider then the void, imagine nothing as best we can. We can not fully conceive nothing. No energy, radiation, time, space, reality, right, wrong, love or hate. Imagine the nothing itself not being. Only a single being fully self sufficient and in this being “IS”. Imagine this being ruminating on you before creation. Seeing your every single glory and failure. Your thoughts are known to him your very essence is exposed. Your shame, your sin, your rape, murder and selfish clawing at the backs of others, no matter how subtle your blood letting is. He sees your every potential. He wields the power to change it; yet in his ultimate sovereignty he allows you to be. Then the most wonderful of all possible outcomes, then the most significant state that any created being could find one's self he chooses to love you. You are loved by the creator! In that love he creates light, sound, and reality. He sets into motion time and space. He collides planets and creates chemicals, he combines into other beings he loves. Time passes and you emerge from a set of inconceivable events. You, bursting forth full of the one question that all of recorded history screams. Why am I here? So you read the collected thoughts of others before you and the theories of those to come. You listen, you learn, you conceptualize and ruminate, you even love others. You also hate, back bite, and think less of those that were created in the same inconceivable circumstances. You see the law of God. You hear his precepts. Your flesh cries out in rejection and perhaps for once you know what you are here for. To worship. Maybe you are here to worship you? There is another possibility and with a bigger picture of the Bible and the scripture it is clear. You need not love you, because you are already loved. You are here to unleash the full torent of your love onto an individual. The reason you were made; to love God and experience him. There are not enough words to encompass all this entails, pain, growth, deep abiding pleasure, the loss of friends and comforts with the acquisition of new and more God centered life balance. Friend God has set the terms it is free to accept the greatest pleasure. Sure there is self denial now but not ultimately. In the end when we see the object of our affection face to face we will never again have to deny ourselves of a single pleasure, because our ultimate pleasure will be in him. All this because he first loved us.