I held my friend’s classical guitar, trying to find a comfortable spot on top of the bags of goat feed that filled the back of the farm’s pickup truck.

I grew up on a farm in the Midwestern United States, so sitting in the bed of a pickup truck was not unfamiliar to me. This truck was parked on a different kind of farm, though, in the midst of a mango orchard in the southern Philippines, where I was serving as an agricultural missionary.

This farm had a lot of familiar smells - animals, soil just wet from an afternoon rainstorm, freshly cut grass. But it was also strikingly different from my childhood farm - the smell of hot chili peppers and vinegar, shrimp paste, and sweet mangoes were new to me.

I finally found a comfortable spot and started singing a new song. A song remembering how I’d experienced God’s love in the past, but also marvelling at how He is always taking me to new places in His heart.

I was touching a new reality in that season as a missionary. We can create frameworks to comprehend the love of God with our minds, but there is always a greater measure. The Word says that “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

Therefore, living in God’s love is much like sitting in the back of that pickup truck in the Philippines - a mixture of the familiar and the new. It’s always the same love, but it’s always increasing and always becoming new to us.

And so we can find ourselves somewhere familiar, surrounded by an unchanging God, but seeing new dimensions of His devotion to us.