What if Jesus really meant it when he said that “God so loved the world?” The whole world. All of it. Everyone in it. Even them. Even you. Even me.
And what happens when you finally realize that you've been fully loved all along? Not only that, but you’ve been fully lovable all along.
As all good Christian kids do, I grew up singing, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so,” but pretty much everything else I learned in the church told me otherwise. It told me I was a detestable sinner, nothing more than a pile of filthy rags (a misrepresentation of Isaiah 64:6, but what I heard and internalized nonetheless). A screw-up who could never measure up. Always too much, yet somehow never quite enough.
I said I believed that God loved me. That he loved everyone. But just underneath that foundational belief lay a gigantic BUT.
God loves me, but only because the blood of Jesus covers me. God loves me, but I have to be better or holier before he will like me. God loves me, but he is perpetually disappointed in me.
Over the last 12 months, the Spirit has been drawing me towards and into the extravagant, unreasonable, inescapable love of God. A love so expansive it sucks all of the air and all of my buts right out of the room. At every turn, I have been accosted by the love of God. I’ve fought against it. Thrown my buts at it. And pushed back with all of the Bible verses I believed “balanced” out that love. But again and again and again came the gentle whisper like a wave lapping at the shores of my heart, “You are delightful. You are lovely. You are loveable. And you are loved.”
One of the many teachers who are challenging me to embrace the fullness of God’s love for me is Father Greg Boyle, a Jesuit priest whose work in the barrios of east LA ultimately led him to found Homeboy Industries, the world’s largest gang intervention and rehabilitation program. In his remarkable book Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, Father Greg recounts innumerable experiences with active and former gang members that challenge and assault my sense of “who’s in and who’s out” along with my underlying beliefs about God’s love.
In one such story, Father Greg recounts a conversation with an incarcerated fifteen-year-old. After this kid gives an account of the horrific abuse he suffered at the hands of his father, he begins to tell Father Greg about his mom. His mom takes seven buses across town in order to visit him every Sunday. Without pretense or warning, Father Greg says to us, the reader: “How, then, to imagine the expansive heart of this God who takes seven buses just to arrive at us.”
A God who takes seven buses. A God who doesn’t need me to get my act together before he comes. A God who doesn’t need my sin to be covered before he can look upon me with tenderness. A God who chases me through the wilderness. A God who sees me. A God who chose to reveal the fullness of his character by putting on flesh and walking through this world alongside his beloveds.
A God who is love. ((Insert quick grammar lesson here from a former English teacher)) Love, as John uses it in chapter 4 of his first letter, is a noun. Other character qualities ascribed to God throughout the Bible are adjectives: words that modify God or explain something about him. He is righteous, holy, just, merciful, slow to anger. But when John, the disciple who fully embraced his identity as God’s beloved, writes that God is love, he doesn’t say God is loving. He tells us God is love. It’s not merely how he is; it is who he is. God and love cannot be separated. And somehow, we find ourselves situated inside of that love. It’s the air we breathe. We can’t escape it.
Which brings me back to my original questions: What if Jesus really meant it when he said that “God so loved the world?” The whole world. All of it. Everyone in it. Even them. Even you. Even me.
What happens when you finally realize that you've been fully loved all along? Not only that, but you’ve been fully lovable and fully lovely all along.
I’m not totally sure yet. But for the first time in my life, I believe it with my whole self. My heart, my mind, my body, and my spirit all testify to the deep and resounding truth that I am loved and lovable. Completely. Utterly. Unavoidably.
And it’s rocking my world. And changing how I look at the world and everyone in it. But that’s a post for another day.
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