By Linda Waltersdorf Cobourn, EdD
March 2, 2025
“O Love, How Deep”
Pastor Amy Peters, Speaker
The date on the church bulletin startles me: March 2, 2025. It has been twenty-five years since the driver of a red pick-up truck ran a red light and ploughed into the side of my husband’s white Taurus. Ron lived, but the injuries he sustained were severe. Much of the next nineteen years were spent in hospitals, surgery rooms, and rehabilitation units. In just a few seconds, I went from wife to spousal caregiver. I saw Ron in the recovery room after the ten hour surgery to repair his crushed chest, ripped spleen, and ruptured aorta. He was gray and still and punctured with tubes and wires.
I don’t think I can do this, I thought. God, only you can give me the strength.
So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.
Ephesians 3:17-18
As Pastor Amy pointed out to us on Sunday, we cannot even begin to comprehend the depth of the love God has for us. A favorite song of the Sunday School students I once taught begin with “Deep and wide, deep and wide, there’s a fountain flowing deep and wide”, but the hymn we sang last Sunday took the love of God to a more meaningful level.
“O Love, How Deep, How Broad, How High” was written by Thomas a Kempis. Twelve times, the words of the hymn ring out, “For us!” demonstrating the inconceivable depth of God’s love.
The first stanza tells of the Birth of Christ, “That God the Son of God should take, the mortal’s form for mortal’s sake.” The third stanza explains His baptism and “for us temptations sharp He knew, for us the tempter overthrew.” In stanza four, the hymnist describes how Jesus prayed and worked “still seeking not Himself, but us.” Succeeding stanzas reveal how He “bore the shameful cross and death, for us at length gave up His breath,” went onto Heaven to reign and “for us He sent the Spirit here, to guide to strengthen and to cheer.” The hymn concludes with the “boundless love” which has won “salvation for us through his son.”
It was this boundless love that I needed on the night of March 2, 2000, and continued to need through 46 hospitalizations and 36 surgeries. In myself, I had neither enough physical strength to care for a husband who was so damaged and ill, nor the emotional power to continue to love him as I had on our wedding day. I did not, but God did. Our lives were changed forever from the moment the truck hit the side of Ron’s car, but God continued to deepen our love for one another and for God. It was a love I could not have imagined, because it was given by God.
and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
Ephesians 3:19-21
Ron left us for Heaven on July 13, 2019. My children and I remained changed forever, knowing our loved one resided in a much, much better place.
How can you let God’s love change you?
