In my freshman year of college my Intro to Psych professor quoted a magazine he was reading that said,
Our deepest desire and our deepest fear are the same. We want to be fully known and fully loved. But look, our fear tells us that to be fully loved, we cannot be fully known, and to be fully known, we must be vulnerable to being loved. So we walk a delicate line of compromise.
I was seated somewhere in the middle row, when his words reached my heart and something powerful filled my chest and welled up in me as I began to tear silently in my bedroom later that day, thinking about what he had said.
I have been raised in the church for a long time and my mother has been an amazing example of a believer in my life.
We didn’t have much growth, but we always made it work. My mother didn’t just talk about trusting in Jesus, she just walked out. I watched my mother pray for provision, protection, I said. I heard him every morning around 5 am crying to Jesus. He sang songs of praise. He prayed for every member of my family with sincerity, everyone he met, every time disaster struck in any part of the world. My mother is the kindest woman I know, and the most dedicated prayer warrior I have ever met. He showed a life that seemed too difficult for me to relate to growing up, but because it was honest … it inspired me anyway.
I went to church camps, retreats, vacation Bible school, Christian concerts, you name it…I went. Sometimes, when I was away, I had these spiritual experiences and I knew I knew it was Jesus. But going to a few retreats, going to church regularly, witnessing my mother praying and living the way she lived, did not make me love Jesus. They just proved to me that it was true. I knew I was more than just a body. I knew I was Spirit. I had heard the Gospel in every form imaginable.
But that’s not why I loved Jesus (although they taught me how to show him how much I love him).
I loved Jesus on the rock.
I loved Jesus when I was in the heart of my depression, my anxiety, my porn addiction, my anger issues and my self-loathing. That’s when I started to see the truth for myself. I’m not a big person. Some people who meet me feel that I am who I am and that life has always been easy for me. But no child likes to be poor. No child likes to feel ugly or strange or unwanted. No child likes to be called ‘that immigrant’.
It’s amazing what sticks with us.
I had a lot of anger in my heart, I had a lot of shame and embarrassment inside me.
Then two of my friends died in high school a year apart. They were great people and I couldn’t wrap my head around it. My head hurts, my heart hurts. I couldn’t pray while I was beautiful. I didn’t know how to dress for church. I didn’t know what to do as I am ready.
Then one morning, I got the script without actually trying it. It wasn’t trying to read it, but it just drew me in. It was Ezekiel 16:6
I was passing by, and I saw you kicking in your blood; you are lying there in your blood, I said to you: “Live!”
This spoke to me. Jesus did not erase the horrible image of me “in my blood” (well, at the time, I was cutting myself so it was real to me). He didn’t hate me. I began to read many Scriptures and I saw them at that time. Clear as day, Jesus knew me. You know me, fully. nothing is hidden from his light.
There I saw that he did not run away from me. I started running towards him.
There I saw that he was not afraid, ashamed of me, angry with me, tired of me, or anything else I was afraid of. When I saw that he was willing to do anything to get me back, I took a chance. I sat up in my bed in the middle of the night, a crying mess, and with trepidation I asked Jesus to really come into my heart. I remember saying, “I don’t know what you can do with me, I’m not much. I haven’t been kind, but I promise I’ll try. If your love is as it’s written here, I want you.”
My life has been different since the day I began to truly love Jesus. Not because I started being kind, loving, caring, and/or selfless. It was because I began to understand that his grace is sufficient. I started to see that Jesus loves me all the time and beyond, he can talk to me and my worst situation and literally change everything. I saw that he could make a dead person like me come back to life.
I love Jesus because he loved me first. Because I love him, I have been and continue to learn how to love people differently in my life.
I’m learning to respect my authority, learning to do more, learning not to find my worth in what I do, learning who I am and how I see value in that, learning how to be kind to the people in my life when I encounter their ‘badness’ and to be kind to myself when I (inevitably) fail again. I learned that none of us is perfect, but that Jesus is not just looking for fair trade or perfect people. I see now that you want my dirty rags as they are, and you want to heal me.
