I am loved

He loves me. He loves me not. He loves me. He loves me not. He loves me.

More than a childhood game, this is part and parcel to my daily faith journey. Back and forth. I waver between two poles. God loves me. God loves me not. Oh, I know that God loves me, or at least I say I know. I can quote all the right verses. I can provide solid arguments about how God maintains a never-stopping, never-giving up, always and forever love for me. And yet, I waver. My heart refuses to cooperate with my head and so I vacillate.

I tell myself that God loves me. I journal about it. I go back and read and reread the portions of the Scriptures that speak of God’s great love to little or no avail. I keep playing the same little game. To be honest, it is exhausting spiritually, emotionally, and physically. Not only is it exhausting but it has an incredible influence on the rest of my life. As my love relationship with God goes, so goes the rest of my life. God loves me. . .I am loving, vibrant, and full of life. God loves me not . . .I am unloving, flat, and a pain in the rear to just about everybody, including myself.

Grasping that God loves me is difficult for me and I can see its effect in every aspect of my life. I think that I struggle with this so much because of how I grew up. My childhood, and a good bit of my young adulthood, ingrained the “truth” that love was conditional. Do well and you are loved. Do poorly and love is withheld. I have more than my fair share of experiences to confirm that this is reality. I suppose we all do. When I overlay this grid on my experience, I can track how my “doing well” periods and “doing poorly” periods mirror my vacillations about God’s love. OK. No big surprise there. What baffles me is that I have spent the better part of the last fifteen years seeking to undo this grid and it doesn’t seem like I have made much progress. Perhaps the biggest step I have made is that I can now affirm that God loves you with a never-stopping, never-giving up, always and forever love, but somehow this love does not extend to me. I know. It sounds crazy. I should get it. I just don’t.

I have been thinking a lot lately about this little game I play. I can hear God calling me to stop and trust his love, to step into his always and forever embrace. He keeps saying the same thing to me in Scripture, in community, in those times when I sit and listen without distraction. I can’t say that the desire to answer is absent. I just don’t have the strength to remain there in that always-and-forever embrace. I have too many experiences to tell me that love just can’t be anything other than conditional. No amount of verses or journaling will ever change what my experiences have taught me so clearly. And this seems to be the issue. For some fifteen years I have been trying to undo experiences with facts. The reality is that facts can never replace what experience has taught us, only new experiences can do this. I don’t know why this should sound so novel to me, but it does. It should make perfect sense. The experience of love is more powerful than knowing about love. Can we even know about love apart from its experience? Probably not, but I sure have been trying. So, I have decided to go about this a different way, the only way that really makes sense. I am going to seek to stop playing this little game by replacing my experiences of conditional love with experiences of God’s unconditional love, not with books, not with verses, but with real life experiences. For me, that means taking time every day to sit in God’s embrace, which is ironically, the very thing he has been calling me to do. Imagine that!

A fellow traveler,

Blake

What’s my next step?

We encourage you to consider engaging in the following as a way of handing off faith in your family.

Hand off a Christ-centered identity: Identity is something we give to our children. As parents, we have the choice to hand off a Christ-centered or world-centered identity. One way we can do this is by being intentional about the messages we give to our children about who they are. This week consider looking for intentional ways to hand off the Christ-centered identity of being loved to your children. One way you can do this is to reframe how you speak to your children in your correction, affirming they are loved but you do not approve of their actions and choices. Another way to affirm this status of loved by God is to intentionally point out aspects of creation which God has given us such as the sun, sunsets, or the rain. When we identify these as gifts of love from God, they become constant affirmations of God’s never-ending, unstopping love.

We encourage you to consider engaging in the following as a way of deepening your own faith.

Spend time experiencing God: Our identity in Christ is often shaped more by our experience of God than our knowledge about him. This week, consider setting aside two or three times to be with God in an experiential manner. This will differ for every person and depend somewhat on how God has made you. We usually do this best in activities or experiences where we feel the most alive and at peace. This might be anything from sitting in silence, to taking pictures, to going for a run. Whatever this might be for you, consider doing it with God and God alone. Be with him in the experience. Seek to feel his pleasure and love wash over you as you engage in the activity with him. Thank him for his presence with you. This is not something we can do just once. In this we are building a relationship with God. Therefore, we must learn and grow in the relationship by making this practice a part of our lives. The more you engage God in this way, the more you fill your life with experiences that affirm he loves you with a never-ending, unstopping, always-and-forever love.