love

Do You Know What You’re Worth?

And the Soul Felt Its Worth
Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash

 

In a Bible study on listening prayer, we were told to ask God, “How much do you love me?” and wait for a response.

While I fully believe God speaks to us, I don’t usually just sit there and wait for an answer. I have more of a “so . . . get back to me on that when you’ve got a chance” attitude. But this time, I just listened and this is what He said: The cross.

Now, I know what Christ did on the cross demonstrates His love for me, but at times it feels a little impersonal. Christ died for me, but He died for everyone. It’s like saying, “You’re unique, just like everyone else.” Who’s to say I didn’t get caught up in the cosmic mix of humanity?

So I said, “God if that’s your answer, you’re going to have to unpack that.” And of course, He did.

A couple of weeks later, I watched the movie, First Knight. As I watched, God said, “Gina, that’s what I did for you. Lancelot diving into the water, jumping through fire, fighting the enemy for Guenevere? That’s what I did at the cross. That desire you have in you for a hero who will sneak into enemy territory, break down the walls, slay the dragon, climb the highest tower because of his love for you – I am that hero.”

The cross was not simply an act of the will, but a passionate, daring, emotion-driven rescue of those He loved more than life itself.

It didn’t start with the cross though. God’s love for us showed up on earth as a helpless, vulnerable baby in the arms of an ordinary girl.

“Long lay the world, in sin and error pining, till He appeared, and the soul felt its worth. A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.” (best lyric of a Christmas song ever. I will fight you on this).

At that moment, He told us how much we’re worth to Him.

We’re worth being cold and hungry and tired and tempted and tried and misunderstood and hated. He was willing to come through a humble birth to live a humble life in order to rescue us.

And all so that one day, He could be our hero, come to our rescue, and save us from death itself. That’s how much we’re worth.

I hope in all the busyness of this season, we hold fast to that. Feel your worth, friends: worth living for, and worth dying for.

Related posts:

How to Have the Perfect Christmas

Are You Missing Christmas? 

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You Are Loved

How was everyone’s Valentine’s Day? Mine was less than stellar. In the morning I woke up feeling off, and by afternoon I had a fever, aches, a head that felt like it might explode, and what sounded like a case of tuberculosis. All this added up to me as the lamest Valentine’s date ever. We spent the evening eating Tijuana Flats in bed watching videos on our phones. It was everyone’s Valentine’s dream.

Tis the season to talk about, think about, hope for, and cherish love. But I wonder how many people, even those of us who are married, even those who have deep relationships with others, long for something more.

We long to be loved. Our hearts ache for a love that is solid, never-ending, secure. We want to be fully known and at the same time deeply loved for all our good, bad, and even ugly.

Oh yes, please even for the ugly. Please tell us it’s possible to be consistently loved even at our worst, so that we can stop hiding our less-than parts behind closed doors and be fully ourselves instead.

Tell us there’s someone from whom we never have to fear rejection, abandonment, for whom we are never just too much, too hard to love.

I’m here to say today: it’s possible. It’s more than possible. It’s true. That is how we are loved. As I thought about what I wanted to share this week, every part of my being wants to tell you this truth:

You are loved. Period. The end. No ifs, ands or buts. You are deeply, without hesitation, loved, with an all-encompassing love.

How do I know? Because the whole of scripture tells me it’s true. The Bible is a love story, friends. It’s one long epic tale of the hero who stole into enemy territory under cover of darkness to rescue the ones He loves, because the thought of eternity without us was unacceptable to Him. We were worth everything. We are worth everything.

He first loved us. That’s important to remember. He doesn’t love us because, or when, or if. He just loves us, with a love that is unshakeable, unchanging, unconditional.

I love how Henri Nouwen puts it in Life of the Beloved,

“My only desire is to make these words reverberate in your being, ‘You are the beloved.'”

Seriously, my one prayer for all of us today, it is that we live loved. We stop wandering, searching for lesser loves to satisfy our hungry souls. We stop doubting. Stop believing the lie that there’s something that gets us voted off His island. Stop listening to the voices that tell us to prove our worth, and we just soak in this truth today:

You are loved, you are loved, you are loved.

So maybe your Valentine’s Day was a bust. Loneliness gnaws at the corners of your life and questions your value. You’re feeling let down by people in your life. Maybe you’re feeling the sting of rejection. We’re all hungry for just a little more love.

So let me say it again: You are loved. May this thought echo off the walls of your hearts today. Repeat it to yourself until it becomes the place where you live. He loves you. 

Related posts:

The Lies of “Too Much” and “Not Enough” 

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What I Want More Than Your Happiness

What I Want for My Kids More Than Their Happiness
Photo by MI PHAM on Unsplash

“It’s not fair,” is a favorite phrase from an unmentioned child in our family.

It’s true. Life is so often not fair. I wish I could make it fair for you. Mostly because then I would be super awesome mommy in your eyes, and it’s always tempting to vie for super awesome mommy status.

But then I remember that I’m not just about your happiness.

I want more for you than that.

More than always wanting life to be fair for you, I want you to know how to handle unjust situations with grace and joy.

More than the blessing of friendship, I hope you learn to be content with loneliness. I hope you develop compassion for the outsider, because you know what it’s like.

More than you acing every test and paper, I want you to learn how to accept failure without it defining you. While breezing through school is fun, the discipline of hard work and time management will serve you better.

More than you winning every game and tournament, I want you to choose grace in defeat, holding your head up high and congratulating the winner with sincerity. That kind of attitude carries over into all of life.

I long for your heart never to be broken. But more than that, I want you to learn that being vulnerable is the way to live bravely and openly. May your broken places serve to make you softer and more compassionate.

At the end of the day, more than your comfort I want your character. More than your success I want your strength to get back up in the face of a fall.

But I know. I know that you think super awesome mommy should make you happy. I know, because this is exactly what I expect God to do with me.

But He wants more for us. 

Character over comfort.

Holiness over happiness.

It’s tempting for me to doubt His love when my prayers don’t land me in a comfortable, happy place, but instead right smack in the middle of growth.

I forget that giving me challenges instead of ease is proof of God’s love, not denial. He loves us too much not to make us more like Him.

I can’t aim for super awesome mommy. I need to aim for “do what is good for you even if it’s hard for both of us because I love you more than life” mommy (I need a shorter term for that). That’s where God’s aiming for both of us too.

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

Related:

I Am Not My Child’s Savior

When Falling Is Good

Promises to My Children

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I Am Not My Child’s Savior

I Am Not My Child's Savior

I am not my child’s savior.

This thought occurred to me yesterday as I walked around our neighborhood. Pondering the fact that our daughter’s team, playing in a tournament an hour away, was not doing well, left me unsettled.

First game was a bust. Second game they knocked two in the goal in the first ten minutes, but let their lead slip away into a tie game. Those two games meant advancing was impossible, regardless of the outcome of the final game. Our daughter walked away from the second game in tears.

Nothing is more important to her right now than this sport. All her future hopes are wrapped up in this. And while we both know that the hold on her heart is too strong, I remind myself it is not my job to make sure her dream doesn’t die. It’s not my job to make it all better. All my unsettledness was because I could. not. fix it.

Oh, but that’s what I want to do. Take away the pain. Erase the loss and disappointment. We all want that. We want wins, and good grades, and close friends, and safety. Eliminate everything that could hurt our kids.

So I set myself up in the position of savior in her heart.

Why We Try to Save

It’s heady stuff to have a person who thinks you can do anything. We slip into the superman complex because it makes us feel good about ourselves that we can be the rescuer, the savior, the protector.

Maybe if we just stay close enough, say the right words, step in at just the right moments, we can fend off disasters. We believe the lie that we can control their worlds.

It feels right. It feels like love, to protect others from pain. But then I look at God and His word and I remember that the path to maturity always involves suffering. It makes us like Him.

Ultimately, apart from putting way too much pressure on ourselves to be more to them than we can be, saving our kids takes away the opportunity for them to look to the real Savior, to learn to rely on Him and receive from Him what they need in times of struggle.

Why We Shouldn’t Save

Being away from my daughter this weekend was hard, but so good for her. She needs me to get out of the way so that she can learn to lean on the One who is always there, who knows the value of failure, loss, loneliness, and pain to mold a heart into His image, and whose wise hands guide her in ways I never could.

We do our people a disservice when we don’t encourage them to turn to Him in times of fear, hurt, discouragement. Our lives are meant to be lived in dependence on Him. Pain is a pathway to that dependence.

“It helps to resign as the controller of your fate. All that energy we expend to keep things running right is not what’s keeping things running right.” Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

All that energy we spend trying to keep others’ lives running right is not what keeping things running right for them. In fact, it might just be what keeps them from Him.

So let’s resign as the controllers, the rescuers, the saviors of our children. Let’s trust the true Savior and teach our children to look to Him in times of trial.

Related:

Where Faith Happens 

Promises to My Children

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Why Christmas Reminds Me to Hope in God

Why Christmas Reminds Me to Hope in God

I hate waiting. That’s why I have Amazon Prime.

‘Tis the season of waiting. We wait in lines, for packages to arrive, for family, friends, parties, planes.

In the Bible, the word wait is often translated hope. They are intertwined. We must wait for the objects of our hope.

Hope feels deeper. We don’t just hope for that gift we want for Christmas. We hope for marriage, children, jobs, for needs satisfied.

Wrapped up in our hope is expectation. We have ideas of how we want our hopes realized. And when we are asking God to step into our hope and meet it, we put those expectations on Him.

What does it look like to hope in God? We place our fragile hopes in His hands, but too often the waiting is long, the expectations unmet. We fear disappointment. Sometimes it’s easier not to hope.

The Israelites knew a little about waiting. They waited in slavery, in exile, for the Promised Land, for a Messiah. In their waiting, they hoped. Their expectations grew. They longed for a leader, a savior, one who would protect them from their enemies and carry them to victory. For hundreds of years, they waited and hoped and expected rescue.

And then Jesus came, and He wasn’t anything they expected. But when I look at His birth, I’m reminded why God is worthy of our hope. In Christmas I see that:

God keeps His promises

Jesus fulfilled every prophecy about the Messiah. “For no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so through him, the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God.” 2 Corinthians 1:20

He has promised us so much – that He will never leave us, He will work all things for good, He will give us abundant life. We can hang our hope on His promises.

He meets our deepest needs

Four men lowered their paralyzed friend through a roof, but instead of healing his body, Jesus forgave his sins (and then healed him). The Israelites thought they needed a leader; God knew they needed a redeemer. We think we know what we want, but God wants to give us what we may not even know we need. Christ’s birth reminds me that not only does He knows my needs, He can also meet them.

His ways are not our ways

The Israelites probably would not have chosen an unwed, teenage mother or a poor carpenter to parent the ruler of the universe, or have made Him a Nazarene. So many of the chapters of my life I would not have written the way God did, but looking back, they are so good. We stumble the most when we hold too tightly to the ways we think God should answer our prayers. Like the Jewish people, we might miss His answers entirely.

He loves us more than life

One of my favorite songs a few years ago was “Touch the Sky,” by Hillsong United. It says, “You traded heaven to have me again.” Christmas tells me to put my hope in Him because of this: He would do anything, give up everything, just to have me.

It might not happen now, or when we expect, but God is always working good on our behalf, meeting our deepest needs, keeping His promises out of his deep love for us. He is worthy of our hope.

This is the season of Advent, which means expectant waiting. So we wait quietly, attentively, continually, dependently. We put our hope not in an outcome, but in a Person.

 

related posts:

How to Have the Perfect Christmas

Are You Missing Christmas?

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Freedom – guest post at Mudroom

Freedom
Photo by Aditya Saxena on Unsplash

It was in that Bible study that I realized I was not free.

We were eight couples, all of us fresh into our time as expats in Singapore, struggling to find our footing in what we jokingly called “Fantasy Island.” That group was a lifeline in the midst of our turbulent transition to a new country, yet I often walked away from times with them feeling insecure and unsettled. Why?

Read the rest of the story at The Mudroom blog, where I’m guest posting this week.

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Either/Or Thinking in a Both/And World

Either/Or Thinking in a Both/And World

Our daughter loved watching Once Upon a Time, a wonderful show about fairy tale characters stuck in our world. She often asked me, “Is he a good guy, or a bad guy?” She wanted to know, to be sure who to like or dislike.

I had watched further than her, so I knew – those characters surprise. They weren’t as clear-cut as we imagine. I had to keep telling her, (and I’m thankful that the characters evolved to prove my point) that people aren’t good or bad. Maybe the evil queen can love. Captain Hook can be sacrificial. Snow White can make poor choices.

Sometimes issues and people aren’t either/or.

But the thing is, we want them to be. Gravitating toward black and white thinking is easier because then we feel solid. We know where we stand. Drawing lines tells us who to include, who to ignore. We know where to put our energy into defending a stance. It feels safe. We think we’re winning.

It all feels sometimes like a giant game of tug of war. This side is right. No, this one is. Either you stand with me or you stand against me. There is no middle ground. Either my side is true, or yours is.

From a Christian standpoint, this feels right. Truth isn’t relative, is it?

The problem is that we draw the circle of absolutes much larger than God does.

We label people in a way He won’t. Jesus spent the most time with people our society would call “bad.” He called out the “good” people on their hidden sin. He doesn’t categorize us in black and white terms; he sees us for the glorious messes we are, the contradictions of our hearts. Jesus sees the both/and in us.

It’s challenging for us to hold those contradictions.

Easier to pretend some of them aren’t true. We write some people off because they are not worth our attention, time, compassion. They are either heroes or villains, either good or bad.

But to be both/and people means we need to open our hearts wider. We need to sit in peoples’ stories so we can know the white police officer who is just doing the best he can, and the black man who is tired of people assuming he just doesn’t respect authority.

We can ache for unborn babies at the same time that we are shocked by the ruthless killing of animals.

While we recognize that our systems are in need of reform, our hearts still break for the desperate who try to cross borders.

We can disagree with leaders and not vilify them. When we see people living “other” than us we know that we can still be “and.”

Let’s stop being either/or people in a both/and world. Drawing lines, taking sides-these keep us from moving toward one another with the gospel.

Let us be like Jesus, who sits with people in their contradictions, the mess, the ache of the world and its fallenness, and He loves. The good news is this – He cares about all of it. We can too.

Related:

We Are All Glorious Messes

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Keep On Loving

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Keep On Loving

I am not one for espousing my political views on my blog. Truth be told, in part it is because I am afraid – I don’t like arguments. It’s also because I think most of the inflammatory topics discussed on the internet are painted too black and white, and are better left for discussion by rational beings in personal contact, rather than bold statements thrown out by faceless people. But today I feel compelled to say something.

I’ve seen about a thousand articles in response to last week’s decision regarding gay marriage. I’ve read some of them. I had no desire to add to the mix. But in my heart, as someone who does believe that gay marriage isn’t something God designed, I have been unsettled. Unsettled because I don’t know how best to respond. It feels sometimes like there are two camps: outrage or acceptance. I don’t believe God wants us to pitch our tents in either.

As I prayed about this issue last week, I asked God how He would like me to respond, and this is what I believe He said,

“Keep doing what I’ve always called you to do: love. Love people well. Move toward them with grace and compassion and truth and respect. Keep believing that I am God and I deeply love people and want them to know that, regardless of how they live. Know that I am not dependent on governments to accomplish my purposes. I never have been. There are plenty of places where governments and societies are against Me, against you. I still work there, because I still love there, and I will not stop. In fact, it is often in those hard places that I am most glorified. So you keep believing that my love is good and that people need to hear about it. Nothing changes.”

At least that’s how I heard it. So I will do it: keep on loving.

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Adoption

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I recently had the joy of seeing a dear old friend  (and by old I mean we’ve known each other a long time. We are not old. There really should be a separate word for this in English) and her family realize their dream of bringing two new daughters home through adoption. They’ve waited so long and their hearts have gone through unspeakable ache to come to this point. It’s awesome to see.

People often talk about adoption in how it reflects God’s adoption of us, but I think this time for me it has become clearer than ever. By that I mean I am more acutely aware of what it means for me, for us, to be adopted into His family.

My friend has written on her blog about the reality for her girls – how as much as they are happy to be adopted, it will take time for them to fully trust this new love, this new family. They have left all they know and come to a strange country and culture. I want to say to them, “You got great parents! You are so loved!” What they may understand at a head level may take time to sink deep into their hearts. I hope it happens quickly.

Aren’t we the same? When we enter a relationship with God, we are brought into a new kingdom, foreign to us. It doesn’t operate the way the world did. We come because we trust, at some level, the kindness of this King. We have no idea how long and how hard He has longed for us, to shower His love on us. Over time, hopefully, we will come to understand the depth of that love and come to define ourselves as His children.

In the meantime, we may have times when we doubt this new love. We may want to look back to things that used to comfort us. We may look at other people, other things, wondering if they will love us more. They won’t. They can’t. I hope that, especially as we look ahead to celebrating the birth of Christ, we can fully trust in this amazing love we have in our Father. He went through everything to get us, and He will not let us go. He longs for us to rest completely in our identity as His beloved children.

We are so very loved.

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The True Self

Years ago, a friend of mine and I had a conversation about being comfortable in our own skin. It was about more than just body image; it was the idea that we could be completely settled into who we are as people. We wanted to be completely ourselves, without apology, without wondering what others thought. We agreed that we weren’t quite there yet.

I can’t say I live there all the time now either, but I have certainly grown in it. I do know that how accepting I am of myself is in direct correlation with how much time I spend listening to the Father’s heart for me, and resting in who He says I am.

My victory for Saturday is that I was me. It was a lot like how I felt when I wrote this post last spring (except for the whole day, and not just a dental appointment). This was great because I was away for the weekend with several women I was just getting to know. It could have been difficult, not knowing how I fit or how to navigate these new relationships, but the quality of these women and the content they chose for our time together made it the easiest thing to just bring all of me, uncensored, to the table.

This feels like a greater victory during transition, because transition can throw your whole identity into question. I’ve been learning through this time that I have to go back more frequently than usual to who I am in Him. I’m reminded of this quote from one of my favorite authors, Henri Nouwen,  “As long as I keep running about asking: ‘Do you love me? Do you really love me?’ I give all power to the voices of the world and put myself in bondage because the world is filled with ‘ifs’.” This temptation grows stronger in transition because the voices in the world have changed and it’s easy to forget that who we truly are hasn’t.

I’ll close with another quote from another favorite author, Brennan Manning, who said, “Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.” Every day is a victory when I remember this.

What are you calling victory today?

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