C.S. Lewis

In awful and surprising ways, we are the objects of His love.  You asked for a loving God: you have one...not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate...but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work...provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes.  It is certainly a burden of glory not only beyond our deserts but also, except in rare moments of grace, beyond our desiring.