“As a physio, you treat people with injuries, and you see a lot of them, and you think you understand what it’s like to be injured, or in pain, but you don’t really. Not until you go through it yourself. And it’s not that you have to have been injured yourself, but it helps – it deepens everything. And I think it’s a bit like that in my understanding of God. I used to think that I knew what it meant that God loves us. I knew it in my head. But then my wife and I had our first son.

“Some time after he was born, I remember reading John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” God gave up his only Son for us.

“I think about it a lot now. I know I’d give up anything for our son … but I can’t think about giving him up. Before, I would have read that verse and thought, oh yeah, that’s nice. Now I read it and think that God’s love is not even understandable. It’s beyond understanding. It says in Ephesians 3 that his love is vast and high and deep … but we don’t really understand deep until we’ve been somewhere deep. Or we don’t understand vast until we’ve been somewhere vast.

“We’ve only got our experiences to go off. And even then, it’s not understandable. Or perhaps it’s like going on a bike ride in the mountains… you go over one peak, and you think you’re there… but there’s another, and another. The further you go, the more you realise there is more to go. That’s how it is when I think about God’s love.”

Darren’s story is part of Eternity’s Faith Stories series, compiled by Naomi Reed. Click here for more Faith Stories.