This Is The Gloaming.

I am grateful for the incessant hunting by Christ for my soul, for His never ending conquest to subdue all the regions in my soul until they are under His reign and authority. He is what Spurgeon called "The Hound of Heaven", the relentless Hunter of His beloved Bride, pursuing us with intensity of an infinite number of suns and the love of an infinite number of young, starry-eyed lovers. This Jesus I speak of is the one revealed to John in Revelation, with a sword protruding out of His mouth, His robe dipped in the blood of His enemies, His brilliance too much for the gray matter between our ears to comprehend. He is the One who created and sustains existence; He is the one who is not bound by limited conceptions of such ideas as "time" and "dimension". He is the Holy One of Israel, a God who, out of love for His infinite glory, created beings with the capacity to share in the joy of knowing Him. And even after our federal father Adam contracted sin and sent it into the very DNA of existence, this God pursued a Bride that would be His own for all eternity.
His love knows no bounds, including the bounds of our culture's very limited and primitive understanding of love. When a person hears that God's love has no bounds, our first, culture-satured idea is that God loves to make much of us, that He sits in heaven and thinks of us and gets butterflies in His stomach and can't wait to think of ways to make us feel happy and joyful. His boundless love means He is free to trample such selfish and childish notions of love, and work in us to give us His love, a covenantal love by a being whose very definition is love. Love is not being made much of; love is experiencing the fullness of God unadulterated and unhindered by anything. When we say we love someone, as Christ followers, we must mean that we will do whatever it takes to help them gain more of Jesus.
And because the love of God knows no bounds, this includes such false notions as "God would not hurt me to have His will accomplished in my life". The destitutions of our souls become our loves, and when God brings upon their demise, it is often a painful tearing, because an aspect of love is the slow bonding of our souls to the object of our affection. This has been for me very recently, a glorious and beautiful friendship that was heading west when east was calling our names. She had become one that I opened my soul to quite easily, and she did likewise. It happened so subtly, because the foolish and unwise are not aware of these things because they are easy to do; those things that are wise are difficult and require much time and pain as we live and learn and figure out why the unwise action is unwise. What I believe to be wise is that the opening up of souls between male and female friends must be kept minimal, unless the Lord has positioned these two hearts to beat one for the other. This was not the case between my friend and I. Wisdom triumphed, and this splintering of the tiniest parts of our souls shared began, resulting in a pain much more deeply rooted than either of us imagined. It was a shock, the sheer amount of tears shed, the days going by as years, the hours as days, the minutes as hours, the darkness descending from the sky earlier causing even more painful introspection. The intensity of the pain was a surprise, because the unwise are unaware of how easy it is to link together, but of how difficult it is to separate.
But Christ has been sufficient through it all, because He is the one our souls hunger and thirst for. When the day comes that He places the persons before us whose hearts beat for us and ours for theirs, this time of pain, this time of aging, of weeping and crying out, will be sweet. It is sweet now, but it is like wine and gall; eventually, it will just be wine. Christ is the ruthless murderer of sin, because as He breaks these things within us, there is more of Him to be gained. His boundless love does not necessitate painless living; may we be broken free from such preposterous lies birthed from the lips of our Enemy. May we not be fools, for the foolish are the most despised in the Scriptures; they are the ones who think their own way is best, that this Eternal Lover cares nothing for us and we are left to our own devices to survive. This pain has resulted in wisdom; we are gold in His furnance, being purified for His rearrival to Earth. How glorious is He!