A Closing Word — How This Came to Be Written

I want to tell you the truth about how this book got made, because it turned out to be the proof of the one thing it most wants you to believe.

I told you at the start that a book cannot teach you to love — that only God can, by His own love poured in from the inside. I believed that when I wrote it. But I need you to know it did not stay a thing I merely believed. It became a thing that happened to me, while I was making this very book.

The first three times I wrote it, it was cold. I knew it was cold. I would read it back and it was correct — the theology in order, the verses in place, the argument holding — and it was dead on the page. It explained love the way you would explain a machine. And a book that explains love and does not carry it has already failed the only test that matters. So I tore it down and started over. And then again. I went looking for a warmer voice, and I found it where it has always been — in John, the one who wrote about love better than anyone, who never argues and only ever leans in close and says the enormous things again and again. I let his voice in. And the book finally became what you are holding. Not a manual. Something nearer to a man talking to you across a table.

And then, this week, while I was doing something as ordinary as cutting my grass — not praying, not studying, just pushing a mower back and forth across a yard — a voice that was not my own inner voice said, as clear as anything I have ever heard: you are finally starting to get it.

I have to tell you why that undid me. It called me by my full name — the long form, the one my own thoughts never use. In my own head I go by the short name, the way you do with yourself. My inner voice has never once addressed me by the long name. So this was not me, encouraging myself. It came from outside the room of my own mind, in a name I do not call myself, at the exact moment I had stopped trying to teach love and started only pointing at the One who teaches it. And the name He used — I will only say that it is a name that means one who is like God, and that this whole book is about Him looking at His children and seeing Himself in them. I did not miss what He did there. I have not stopped thinking about it since.

This was the second time in my life that words came to me like that. The first was years ago, and it turned me down a different street than the one I meant to walk, and what He showed me on that street became something real and good that I have written about elsewhere. I will not retell it here; it has its own home. I only want you to know that this was not a one-time trick of a tired mind. It has happened before, and it bore fruit before, and I know the difference between my own thoughts and the ones that arrive from somewhere else.

I tell you this not so you will think more of me. If anything, think less — I am a slow student who needed the lesson cut down to four drafts and then spoken aloud to me over a lawnmower, and who is still, by his own honest reckoning, not a naturally kind man. I tell you because it is the plainest evidence I have that everything in this book is true. I did not teach myself to write about love. I could not. He taught me, from the inside, in the middle of the work — and He let me feel it happen, just the once, so that I would know the thing I was claiming on the page was real.

And hear the word He actually used. Not you have arrived. Not now you understand. He said you are finally starting to get it. That is a word to a man still on the road, not a man at the end of it. If you are still on the road too — still slow, still falling short, still going after a love that does not come naturally — then that word is as much for you as it was for me. We are starting to get it. That is all any of us are doing. And it is enough, because the One teaching us is not in a hurry, and He is not going to stop.

The book pointed. He did the teaching. That is exactly what I told you it would be on the first page. Now I have told you how I came to know it for certain.

To Him be all of it.