I open my eyes to see digital numbers cutting through the dark, a steady red in the blackness. The bedroom clock reports that it’s 5:50 a.m., an hour earlier than I usually rise on a dark winter morning.

My husband still slumbers. Our blankets rise and fall with each breath. Outside, these farm fields hibernate under a white duvet.

I could go back to sleep, but I can’t. My thoughts are drilling down on one tiny word: So.

I can’t stop thinking about it.

I push back covers, fumble in the shadows for my Bible, and pad to the kitchen. I need answers.

I make coffee, turn on the news. It’s depressing. They’re talking about the pain … a world reeking with pain. So much pain. So much. So.  

I open the Bible on the kitchen counter — Bread as breakfast. I lean over pages, and push the slipped-down glasses up the bridge of my nose to find the word: “So.”

One word. Two letters.

There it is. Right there.

“For God so loved the world …” — John 3:16

That much. So loved.

I know these verses. I memorized them in nursery school, sitting on tiny wooden chairs, curved by the piano in the church basement. Hortense — I still remember her bluish-gray hair — bobbed her head to emphasize each word.

“God. So. Loved …”

Maybe this sounds like old news to you. But for me, it’s banner-headline material. Will someone call CNN? Does the world yet know that this — THIS! — is the antidote to the rancor of the world?

“So loved.” That much! So much love. So much. So.

I read the words again, marking the world’s most well-known verse in green highlighter for the first time in my Bible.

Could it be I missed this all along? Could I have missed the depth of the love?

If the Gospel were a novel, this would be the one verse on the dust-cover. If I were the author, this would be my 30-second pitch to the publisher.

“What’s your Book about?” they would ask.

And I would say: “Well, the main character, God, so loves this messed-up world that He does the unthinkable: He sends His only Son as a gift-offering to die a painful death for a world sitting on the ragged brink of disaster. And if these people believe in the story’s protagonist, they will never die. The hero will spare them from death.”

I stare at the verses on onion-skin pages. And I look at the one … single … word.

So.

Outside, the Creator sends another day. Do I ever really notice? Is the “so” I say, most often this one: So what?

Outside the bluish morning light sends darkness scampering. Snow blushes pink.

I click at the keyboard, and Google “Bible commentaries on John 3:16.”

I want to know about the “so love.” But can I ever really comprehend the depth of that love — limitless, infinite, sacrificial?

I find a piece of the answer. The commentators say the Greek word is this: houtos. The commentators say that rarely do the Bible’s authors use this one word — houtos — to convey deep emotion.

But here, God moved the pen strokes like this: οὕτως

So = οὕτως.

“He has put an eternity of meaning in the particle, οὕτως, so, and left a subject for everlasting contemplation, wonder, and praise, to angels and to men.”— Clarke’s Commentary on the Bible

I write the world houtos in the margin of my Bible.

He houtos loves me because He houtos loves me. I’ve got a mind to live this day like I so believe that.