23 words only. Repeated throughout, these words make a total of 66 words for the entire book, and yet its simplicity is profound.
In comparison, it seems the ability I have to define love is frustratingly limited. It is an incomprehensible state of being, the fact that I am perfectly loved by God, so to describe the growing sense of its perfection, will always only be a glimpse of it.
It was this same frustration I felt as I talked with a girlfriend about love. When I would say “God loves you”, or “you are loved”, her personal definition of love would bring to mind the experiences and feelings she had from childhood: broken, imperfect, deficient, lacking, selfish, abusive, even the best experiences had failed from time to time. Because the love she received was not good, to say “God is love” was something unfamiliar, foreign to her, and even ‘not good’. She needed a redefining of love. The picture of love she carried inside from what she had experienced, and the walls she had built to protect herself from being hurt again, the ways she looked for love, were not true of what God’s love is like.
How do you redefine love, when God’s love is foreign to our experience?
I have a thing for children’s storybooks, especially the simple rhyming ones suited to pre-reader aged children. Dr. Seuss and the Berenstain Bear books were read over and over again in our home when the boys were little. The simple, easy words and pictures were lots of
Inside. Outside. Upside. Down was one of our favourites. It has only 23 individual words!
After talking that day with my girlfriend and reflecting on the frustration I have, Why can we not comprehend this love? Why can we not get that this love is what we are looking for? longing for the discovery I have made be true for her too, this Berenstain book came to mind. My boys are now grown so it has been years since I have read this book. But in a fun way, in allegory form, this book explains in the simplest of terms what God’s ever-present, embracing, unfailing love is like. I read a quote recently from Pablo Giacopelli which says, “The only place where we can be separated from God is within our minds…and even that is an illusion”; the Bible says, “Nothing can separate us from the love of God”; and my superimposed allegory of Inside, Outside, Upside Down, all express that NOTHING and NOWHERE and NOT EVER are places and situations where God’s love is present in all its perfection. This children’s book, so simply tells this.
The story goes like this –
A boy bear cub finds a box. He goes inside the box and closes it. The box is mistakingly picked up, turned upside down, placed on a sack-barrow by the father bear who does not know his bear cub is inside, and put on the back of a truck. He heads to town. On this journey, the cub finds himself in and out and up and down while inside the box. The truck hits a bump, the box flies open and the boy cub falls out of the box and off the truck, at which point he excitedly runs home to tell his mother bear, “Mama, Mama, I went to town. Inside. Outside. Upside. Down.”
We are inside the box.
We are inside of the box of God’s Perfect Love. The four walls, the sides, the top, and the bottom have us fully enclosed. Inside. No matter where we find ourselves on this life’s journey and no matter the situation or circumstances – the upsides or the down – we are fully inside the box. Fully enclosed. Fully in. Fully surrounded by the box’s walls. The box we are in, is outside, in this often overwhelming world of life. All too regularly, there is a sense of tumbling around, difficult places we find ourselves in. We hit our head. There are many bumps and much confusion about where we are and what we are doing. The darkness inside sometimes makes us feel overwhelmed and afraid, and yet other times it is an adventure into the unknown. We don’t necessarily know where we are, or are able to see where we are going, and we may even fall off the back of the truck occasionally, but at all times, we are inside. Inside the box. Inside love.
There is no circumstance or time where we are not in the care of our God, our Father. For the entire journey – the insides, outsides, upsides, and downsides – even at the point of the box falling off the truck, the Father is there, present – and in the end, we are safely home.
I know the story has some big holes in it, if one wanted to be pedantic. It wasn’t written as a story about God’s love, it is not inspired scripture, it is merely a fun story to help children read. I certainly doubt Stan and Jan Berenstain had this allegory in mind when they wrote it, but the picture is clear enough. We are at all times inside of love. No matter what happens, where we go, or what we go through, the Presence of God’s love and the care that He has for us, surrounds us, like a box.
Whether we understand this or not – and most often we just think we are going to town on our own – we are inside the box. We don’t often see the box around us and so we think we are alone. But we keenly notice the tumbling and the darkness and the upside down circumstances of life. We might call out, Father, where are you? Why have you left me on my own? Don’t you care? I’ve fallen off! yet all the while we have not realised we are inside the box. To be human is to be born inside the box – Perfectly Loved, perfectly surrounded by this love, loved always through the ups and downs, never left to be alone – the box always enclosing us, us always inside of it.
And when we find ourselves home, our eyes open to see all of life that we went through on our journey with a new vision, being able to cry out with a perspective new but no less true of, Mama, mama, I went to town. Inside. Outside. Upside. Down. All the way. In a box. With the Father.
The incredible, yet sad truth I realize from this simple fun story, is when I think of my girlfriend. The desperate soul-alone sense she often feels. Oh God, she is always inside of love. She just doesn’t know it. She feels outside of the box, and unworthy of the box, searching always for this box to climb into, but not realizing she is already in. God has never not been with her. His love for her is all she desires and needs. Through the days she grew as a little girl, when she became a woman, the times when she was taken and used and ruined by humanity’s version of love, when she was frightened, when she donned the protective stance she now continually wears, when all she knows and experiences is counterfeit or broken love, every single moment of every day of her life, she is loved by God, she is inside His love.
She is in the box, loved always.