I am loved

I’ve heard the horrible stories about experiments in orphanages where affection was withheld from young children, and they died. Whether those stories have been embellished in the telling I don’t know. I do know that the spirit of an unloved human of any age cannot thrive.

People will do anything for love. A cliché yet true. Children crave the love of their parents. A woman craves the love of a man. Even God said that a man should not be alone; he needs a woman. Knowing that I am loved is foundational to my sense of worth. If no one cared, what in life matters?

The poor theology in the television show “Touched by an Angel” is right on this one point. The lead characters’ main message is, “God loves you.” He does.

The love of God is not like our love. We usually have conditions. The other person must be loveable, or somehow worthy of love, or at least have an attached reason. We will love our kids even if they are brats, but not the neighbor kids who might be just as bratty. We love those who are generous toward us, who offer compliments and gifts. We love the cute and cuddly, those who agree with our ideas, and those who listen and pay attention to our words. We love the rich, or handsome, or popular people. In other words, our love has attached strings.

Not so with God. He “sends rain on the just and the unjust” not because we do anything to deserve it but because “God is love.” The very nature of God is to care about people and want the best for them. While His treatment and actions may not seem like it, we who know Him understand that He is working all things, even the negatives of our lives, together for our good, to help us become the people He intended in our creation, people who are like His Son, Jesus Christ.

God’s love is not like ours. We will spoil and pamper, protect and shield those we love so that they do not suffer any hardships. God knows that it is hardship that produces character and strength, and trials that prove our faith in Him and produce perseverance. He does sift and sort, making sure whatever happens to us has value, but He does not put us in a bubble—unless we consider that His sovereign control of our lives is a bubble of love.

Romans 8 ends with questions. One of them is: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” It lists some possibilities, then says, “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

He loves us so much that He died for our sin that we might live. He loves us so much that He accepts us the way we are, sin and all. And He loves us so much that He will not leave us that way, but uses the stuff of life to transform us into His likeness.

Whoever else might love us, nothing compares to the pure, everlasting, unconditional, and powerful love of God. And how I need to remember that when life feels more like a battering ram than a carving tool!