God is Love

In many of my religious studies classes, I've commented that those three little words, at the end of 1 John 4:8 were, in my opinion, the most profoundly elegant and beautiful scripture I knew and I've read the scriptures of many of the world's religions. I was thinking about those words the other day as I walked and thinking about John 3:16 and it occurred to me that this was a truly radical viewpoint. Every person I looked at - from the homeless people who spend the days on the beach, to the elderly couple walking by, to the teens who I was sure should have been in school, to the toddlers and their mothers - according to these scriptures God loves all of them -  with a passionate love deep enough to die for that person. I cannot truly comprehend a LOVE that expansive - a LOVE that is God - a God that is Love. It sounds simple - three little words - but they contain something so profound that a lifetime of meditating on those words wouldn't begin to plumb the depths of their meaning. Maybe that's what Heaven is for ;).