God Loves You

It's the greatest truth of the Christian faith...and the hardest one to believe: 

God loves you. 

Yes, you. 

Way back when the whole Jesus thing was still fairly new, Paul wrote a letter to a young church whose people were losing their way a little bit. The church was in Colossia, and sin was starting to creep its way in. 

In chapter 3, Paul gently reminds them to put away all these sins of the flesh - the things that belong to their earthly nature. Things like sexual immorality, impurity, lust, greed. Even evil desires. He tells them to stop lying to each other and being angry with one another and letting "filthy language" come from their lips. He says, "This is who you used to be, but not any more." 

Yet, the fact that Paul was even mentioning these things in his letter to them means...they were still these things. They were still engaged in these things, still doing these things. Still being hateful and malicious and angry and immoral and impure and lustful and greedy and a whole host of "evil" things. 

But in the very next sentence, he changes the whole tone of everything: 

Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourself with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience (3:12). 

And now, wait a minute. 

Because he just called them out for being persons of the flesh, for being disgusting, for not being the kind of people they should be but the kind they used to be. And then, in what feels like the very same breath, he reminds them they are "holy" and "dearly loved." 

I don't know about you, but that's a hard one for me. Put me in front of a mirror, and I'm bound to see my flesh. I'm bound to see the ways I'm not measuring up, even to my own standards, let alone God's. I'm prone to wallow in my brokenness and lament the fact that I'm still living my flesh, still living the old life, still the same old person I swore I didn't want to be any more (not that I ever wanted to be her). 

And it's easy to forget that at the very same time that I am all of those things, I am also holy and, most importantly, dearly loved. 

But such it is. That's the heart of the whole thing. God is love. And if God is love, then you are loved by Him. Nothing else could be more true. 

So if you're beating yourself up today, if you're looking in the mirror at someone who just messed up again, who just fell into an old pattern, who just made the same mistake, who just chose something you swore you'd never choose again, and you're wondering what this life you're living says about you, know this: it only says you've temporarily forgotten. 

Because the most important, the most true, the most amazing thing about you is not that you're somehow still here, somehow still pushing through, somehow still making it despite all your mistakes. No. The most important, most true, most amazing thing about you is that you are dearly loved. 

For God is love. 

And that means you. 

God of the Unseen

Believe it or not, there are folks in this world who believe in things like "coincidences," "luck," and "pure chance." Things that "just happen," completely out of the blue. 

I am not one of these folks. 

I was reading a book recently by a person who claimed to be both a scientist and a Christian, and she claimed that science believes - at this point in human history - that it can only account for about 5% of all things in the entire universe. Put another way, science is ready to confess than 95% of the stuff that's "out there," we haven't even discovered yet. 

So if you're a person who believes in science, that's 95% of stuff that's affecting your life that we don't know about, can't account for, and don't understand. 

The question, then, obviously becomes: can't faith account for it?

Can't faith in God account for what we don't understand? We confess that God is mystery. We know that we cannot fathom Him in our finite minds. We know that He is doing more in the world than we can ask or imagine, than we can possibly begin to understand. We know that even what we do understand, we don't really understand. 

We know that sound and light both can travel in waves, but we don't know why they travel in waves. We know that different colors come across different frequencies in the spectrum, but we can't explain how it is that we process them that way. We know that a seed becomes a full-fledged plant, but how a walnut becomes a giant tree, nobody really knows. DNA, we say, but okay...what? 

Then, we say there's coincidence. We say there's chance. We say there's luck. We say that the 95% of stuff we can't account for (which, by the way, is a complete guess in and of itself, for how can you know how much you don't know?) just "randomly" bumps up against itself or something else and creates opportunities and goodness and love...

...and yet, if those same things bump up against themselves or something else and create disaster, panic, illness, and pain, we wonder why God isn't good any more. Go figure. 

So whatever you want to believe, it's cool, I guess - to each their own. But the question comes back to what we can't explain, whether that's science or chance or luck or whatever you want to call it. 

For me, it's pretty easy - it's God. 

Paul says, in the opening to his letter to the Colossians, that our God is the one who created everything, including the "visible and the invisible" (1:16). 

In other words, that stuff you can't account for? Maybe it's the invisible stuff that God still created. That chance? Maybe it's divine. That luck? Maybe it's favor. That coincidence? Maybe it's blessing. 

Your life? Maybe it's love. 

In fact, I know it is. For God so loved the world...and that means you, too. 

Be Not Afraid

It's one of the most oft-repeated assurances in all the Bible: 

Be not afraid. 

When we read those words, we think it's a translation issue, some kind of throwback to the King's English that, if we were to re-translate it today, would mean something roughly like "Don't be scared." And so we spend our lives of faith trying not to be scared, telling ourselves we won't succumb to it, putting on a brave face and plastering a blind faith over every situation we face. 

I'm obviously not scared. See? I'm smiling and telling you how good God is. Can't possibly be scared right now. Not me. Nope. 

Which is great, I guess, except that underneath it all, we're still scared. If you were to peel back the layers of our lives and uncover one by one our defense mechanisms, it's not surprising to find that at the very core of us, we're still scared. 

And that means that we're failing at what we think the Bible is telling us to do. Don't be scared? How can I not be scared?

As someone who has spent what seems like an excessive amount of time in her life being scared (admittedly sometimes even for good reason), let me tell you something I've done that has changed my perspective on life: 

I put the emphasis on another syllable. 

Most of us read "Be not afraid," and we think, "Don't be scared." But these days, when I read "Be not afraid," I think "be...not afraid." Be "not afraid." 

Not afraid is a type of courage. It's the willingness to look something scary in the eye and decide...nope. Not gonna be intimidated. Not going to be afraid. It's embracing our own human frailty, knowing we might fail, knowing we might fall, and not letting that be the defining characteristic of this moment. It's looking at the life that's in front of us, knowing what can happen, and doing it anyway. 

Not because we've somehow become unafraid or "not scared," but because we're choosing something different. 

We are literally putting the emphasis on a different syllable in our life as we're living it, and when we do that, there's no place for being afraid. 

I am "not afraid." I am not not...scared. I am choosing "not afraid" as my default position. 

And being "not afraid" lets me choose something else - something like courage. Something like curiosity. Something like adventurous. It lets me choose to feel my own belovedness, the way that God has been merciful and kind to me. It lets me choose to be humbled, to recognize my own strength and depend instead upon God's strength. It lets me see grace in a new way. And healing. And power.

And love. 

What would "not afraid" open up for you in your life if you were to choose it today? What would your life look like with an emphasis on a different syllable? 

What would it take for you to look at a situation, even one in which fear might seem reasonable, and decide...nah. Not it. Not today? 

What would it mean to you to stop trying not to be scared and to simply embrace being not afraid? 

God Finishes

Have you ever been stuck in a season of waiting? 

You have prayed the prayers, you have put in the work, you continue to wake up every day and do your due diligence, but you're still waiting. You're waiting for the door to open. You're waiting on the darkness to break. You're waiting on the goodness to come. You're waiting on the promise of God to come true in your life, the promise that you're so sure of. 

I think the hardest waiting for us is something we could call "active waiting" - the kind of waiting you're doing when you're working for it. 

Seven months ago, I undertook a course of physical therapy designed to help break some chains that have fallen heavy on my shoulders. In that time, I have made a great amount of progress, but I'm still not where I want to be. My physical therapist told me that the entire process, to get me to my goals, would likely take 8-12 months. Eight. to. twelve. months. 

I have to be honest - the more progress I make, the harder it is to continue to wait. The more things I find that I am able to do that I wasn't able to do before, the easier it is for me to start believing that this is as good as it gets, that this is as far as I'm going to come. I try to keep that eight to twelve month timeline in my mind, but here I am at month seven, and...it's hard to believe it's still coming. 

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with one of my doctors about getting off one of my medications, a drug I have been taking for almost two decades. Know what he told me? It sounds like a good idea, but I won't know for eighteen months how it will really affect me. Whether it will be good or not. Whether my body will accept life without it. Eighteen months. 

What in the world am I supposed to do for eighteen months? 

These are just a couple of examples from my current life, but we could keep going. I remember the seasons when I was desperate for a job, any job...and the ones when I was aching for a job more closely related to my heart. I've been waiting on my future husband for decades, and the longing in my heart to have children of my own has not yet been fulfilled. 

I know folks who are waiting on their finances to steady out, their sense of belonging to increase, their health to stabilize, their weight to drop, their kids to grow up, their grandkids to be born, their parents to settle into a new season, their homes to be finished, their cars to be upgraded, their churches to blossom, their chains to break, their habits to form...we could go on and on. 

And in these seasons of waiting, these agonizing seasons of waiting, we really only have one truth to hold onto - a truth that has become so oft-repeated that it's almost cliche, but it truly is our lifeline: 

That the God who began a good work in us will most assuredly complete it (Philippians 1:6). 

That's it. That's all we've got. On the hard days, on the dark days, on the days that feel like the last days, when we are ready to give up, ready to give in, ready to roll over, the only thing we truly have is the deep, abiding knowledge that God loves us and...He's working on it. He's still working on it. He's putting the pieces in place one infinitesimally small piece of dust at a time and still working us toward that good thing that our hearts already know is happening...if only we can wait until it gets here. 

And so, we keep waiting. But not as those without hope, for we know that the outcome is certain - something good is coming. Because good is all that God does. Whether it looks like what we think it should look like, turns out the way we want it to, or comes in our own timeline or not, it's gonna be good. And it's gonna be finished. 

Thank you, Lord. 

God You Know

It's not what you know; it's who you know. 

There's plenty of truth to that statement floating around in our world. Some days, it can feel like we're stuck in a perpetual middle school with all of the ways that we try to divide ourselves - by color, class, gender, experience, education, economics, preferences, religion, whatever. If there's a way to draw a line and make a ladder, we'll do it - and then the folks at the top will make exceptions for the folks at the bottom based on all kinds of subjective criteria, namely, whether they like you or not. 

As an introvert, I will tell you that I owe plenty of opportunities and accomplishments in my life to extroverts who have adopted me and drawn me into places my quiet self would never get invited on my own. 

It pays to have friends.

But the greatest blessing is to be a friend of God. 

Because while we're here trying to figure out how to get to the top, how to climb the ladder, how to be noticed, how to be appreciated, how to move from one class to another, how to prove ourselves, how to be liked, God's out here already loving us and He treats every one of us exactly alike. 

In God, there is no male nor female, no slave nor free, no top nor bottom, no one with access and one trying to get in. In God, we're all the same - sinners saved by grace, broken loved by God, treasured just for who we are. 

Paul says it in his letter to the Ephesians - even masters are supposed to treat their slaves well because we're all slaves to God and in Him, "there is no favoritism" (6:9). In Him, there is no hierarchy. In Him, there is no desperate clinging and trying to climb and laboring to hold on. 

Slave or master, husband or wife, child or parent, male or female, educated or uneducated, rich or poor, it doesn't matter - there is no favoritism. There's no special "in;" we're all already in. 

And it really takes the striving away. It really takes the pressure to perform away. It really changes how we approach life, faith, love, and all the things of this world. 

Which means, there really is truth in the statement we started with, but it's not the truth we think it is. It's not the truth that says we have to know someone in power who is willing to take pity on us and drag us up a rung or two. 

It's the truth that says we're already loved by Someone in power who showers us with grace and draws us nearer to Himself. 

And if that's Who you know, you are blessed indeed.