51茶馆

I had a math teacher in high school who would zealously cover the board with equations, take a step back, and remark in awe, 鈥淚t鈥檚 too beautiful to be false!鈥� This always felt like a sacrament to me. The world is too beautiful to be false and because everything in the world reveals the presence and power of God, that beauty draws me Godward each and every day 鈥� so long as I pay attention to it.

Above all, I believe in God because of love. For most of my life, I felt closest to God when I felt loved and lovable. But the most profound experience of God鈥檚 presence was when I most powerfully loved another. My wife and best friend carried our son Noah for 42 weeks. 8 hours before labor was to be induced, our son decided to arrive on his own. But labor did not go as we planned and what started out as incredibly painful and scary turned into a crisis. Noah鈥檚 heart rate plummeted and there was a mad dash to save him before it was too late. The OB used suction to remove him as quickly as possible and I stood frozen, in horror, as she used the kind of force I would expect to pull a whale

out of the ocean. The trauma of his birth had twisted his neck, malformed his head, and left him screaming (which he did almost every minute he was awake for the first four months of his life). He was red from all the yelling and pulling, his head more conical than spherical, and he looked nothing like I had imagined when I spent the last 9 months dreaming of this moment: the chance to finally hold my firstborn child.

Holding this precious little life, so fragile, so helpless, and so upset, my heart burst. I felt like the Grinch in the 1966 animated movie when he hears the villagers singing Christmas carols and the x-ray box over his chest shows his heart growing and growing and growing until it gets so large it cannot be contained by the x-ray frame. I had no idea I could love someone so deeply, so unconditionally, so irrevocably. Noah did nothing to merit my love; he wasn鈥檛 cute, he wasn鈥檛 calm, and he was nothing like I expected. And yet it was impossible to love him even a tiny bit more. My heart burst with love simply because he was mine. He was precious. Sacred. And I was overwhelmed with wonder, awe, joy, and delight. Standing in the delivery room at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge Massachusetts on July 29, 2009, I could see myself from above, holding Noah, bursting with total love, joy, and delight. And in that moment, I felt a complete unity with God, as if God planted this insight into my heart: this is exactly how God feels about each and every person. Infinite love, joy, and delight. All the time. No qualifications or exceptions. God鈥檚 presence, power, and love has never been more real for me than in that moment. That insight is not just what makes God real for me, but it reminds me why I鈥檓 here and what this life is about: to savor and spread that love, joy, and delight as much as I possibly can.