Correct Formula for Volume

It was a typical Tuesday. 

I was doing math with my fifth grader.

When I am teaching my children, I try to give them my undivided attention. Church business, ministry things, laundry, and bills take a back seat. 

It was a good thing they did on Tuesday because math needed my full, focused attention. 

“A rectangular tank is 90cm long and 50cm wide. It contains 162 liters of water when it is ⅔ full. Find the height of the tank.”

“Well,” I told my daughter, “what I do for problems like these is write out the formula I’m going to need right at the top.” And I wrote: Volume = Length x Width x Height.

I quickly reread the problem because I wasn’t sure where to go from there. 

And just like that, the Holy Spirit brought this to mind: “that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

Ministry things jumped back to the forefront of my mind. Just on this typical Tuesday, beloved brothers and sisters in Christ were dealing with domestic assault, miscarriage, addiction, temptation, financial difficulty, threat of losing a job, healing after sexual abuse, cancer, wayward children, and not knowing what to do.

These are difficult problems.

I heard my own voice saying, “What I do for problems like these is write out the formula I’m going to need right at the top.”

Breadth x Length x Height x Depth. The love of Christ surpasses knowledge. It is deep enough for all of these problems and myriads more.

I looked back at the math on the page. The tank in the diagram was only ⅔ full. That isn’t true for the volume of the love of Christ. The Apostle Paul prayed that believers would have the strength to comprehend the volume, to know the volume, and to be completely filled with the volume of the love of Christ- filled right to overflowing.

Why don’t I write this formula at the very top of every problem instead of letting them drain me of all my own solutions and resources. 

“This tank is only ⅔ full,” I tell my daughter, “and we’ll have to convert liters to centimeters before we’re finished.”

God’s love changes us- it converts us- before it ever changes the problems that we’ve encountered. 

Even when we find that the depth of the liquid in the tank is 36cm, we still have another step before we know how full the tank could be. We have to divide it by ⅔ before we can figure out what it will be at 3/3. 

Division doesn’t typically make things fuller, but it does in God’s economy. He fills us so that we can distribute His love to all who need it. 

When we apply His math to the problems of a typical Tuesday, we come up with the correct answer every time.