This might be long.  It might be boring.  But I’ve thought a lot over the last few months about how God worked in my heart to bring me to a place where I could believe in His love for me, and so I thought I would write it out.

For as long as I can remember, I believed, and would even say, that God loved me by default – that He loved the world, and since I was a part of the world, He had to love me.  I’m honestly not sure why I believed that.  I could probably go into some analysis of my childhood to try to figure out the answer, but I am content for now to say it was a lie of the enemy that had a very firm grasp on my heart.  And somehow, I never really recognized it as a problem until a few years ago.

I think it came to the surface because, over and over again, I found myself getting angry with God when people failed me.  I had tied my perception of how much God did or didn’t love me with how much people loved me.  If I felt particularly unloved by a person, I felt abandoned by God.  If I felt loved and accepted by a person, I was more likely to think I mattered to God.  Looking back, this is where I think God started His work in my heart.  He brought conviction over the fact that I was putting people in His place.  He took me to His Word, and reminded me (or, maybe, really revealed to me for the first time) that He alone is perfect and holy and infallible.  No person was going to give me an accurate picture of God’s love for me.  His Word needed to be that authority in my heart.  And over the course of a few months, God was just continually impressing upon my heart the fact that He is holy.  Completely set-apart.  Always above reproach.  Never changing.  Without even a hint of any imperfection in character.

Once that was straightened out, God began working on another misperception I had.  This time, it was a belief, I think more subconscious than anything else, that God would be disappointed, angry, frustrated, impatient with me if I sinned or failed or just didn’t do something as well as someone else.  I would tell myself how I thought God must see me, rather than listening for His voice.  Yes, there would be moments when I would listen, and be struck by His gracious response to my obvious ineptitude, but those weren’t the moments that I chose to remember.  So, He began to bombard me with the simple truth that He is good.  Even when rational thinking would completely justify rejection or condemnation for my failure, God would never respond to me with anything other than kindness and gentleness and patience.  Because His nature is good.  Wholly and completely.  It isn’t circumstantial or changeable.  Again, over and over, He opened my eyes to really see that I couldn’t do anything that would make Him turn me away, or harm me, or ignore me.  I learned to trust His goodness to me.  Maybe that doesn’t seem like a big thing.  It certainly doesn’t seem too impressive in writing.  But I am not a trusting person, in any capacity, and to be free from the burden of constantly trying to analyze where I stand with God made a huge difference in my heart.  There is freedom in trusting.

At this point, I had gotten my perceptions about God’s character in line (at least, for the purposes of this particular work in my life), but I still didn’t believe He loved me.  I saw myself pretty clearly.  I knew how unlovely I was (am?).  Surely, God saw me the same way.  Why would He love me…how could He love me…when I was just not who I was supposed to be?  It felt like a daily, sometimes moment-by-moment wrestling match that went on inside me – trying to be the person that the rest of the world says is acceptable and beautiful and worthy – a wrestling match that always left me defeated and convinced that there was nothing about me worth loving.  Until, one day, when I told God that I hated who He made me, He responded with a forcefulness that stunned me.  I love who I made You.  For weeks and weeks I came back to that statement countless times, not understanding how it could be true, not wanting to let myself believe it, but knowing with a certainty that it was the voice of the Lord speaking to my heart.  No matter what else in life might be telling me otherwise, the truth is that God made me who He wanted me to be, and He did so because He found something about my form lovely and precious and worth creating.  Yes, this form is marred by sin, but the form is still me, and not someone else.  It was the last piece of truth that I needed to be convinced.

I still can’t say I fully understand.  Really, I think the whole truth of it is beyond comprehension.  But I know God loves me.  On my worst days, I know God loves me.  When life doesn’t make sense, I know God loves me.  When I feel unlovable to and unloved by the rest of the world, I know God loves me.  And He faithfully, patiently, knowingly moved in my heart to bring me to this place.  I’m at a loss for words to say how thankful I am.