Dear Ethan,
I want to thank you for your honesty in sharing your struggles with me this afternoon. Opening up is never easy, especially for guys like us. But isn’t it a wonderful thing to be able to expose our weaknesses…and find strength in doing so?
Your sharing reminded me of a time in my life when I really wrestled with believing that God loves me. I knew the intellectual truths – that God is love, that God loves me, that God loves everyone. Yet, like you, I felt unaffected by it in my real life. The love of God had been so generalized and cheapened somehow. It was hard to sense any comfort, difficult to be at peace, and almost impossible to feel at rest.
I don’t think there are any secrets to feeling the joy of knowing that God truly, deeply loves us. We can tell ourselves over and over again that He does, yet that repetition in itself doesn’t quite seem to help all the time. And we’re stuck…or perhaps we feel worse off than when we began.
My advice to you might not even be helpful, but here it is anyway. What I have found helpful was to read in Scripture God’s love towards his people in general and certain people in particular. For example, I think of the prodigal son…the loving father going up on his roof looking far into the distance day after day, hoping that his wayward son will come back. I think of the father sprinting like a mad man to embrace his filth-covered son. I think of the son being covered with the best robe, being fed the best food, and the great celebration of the son’s return – none of it deserved.
Though we rejected God, God embraced us. Though we’ve forsaken him, he will never forsake us. Though we were dirty, he took upon himself our filth so that we might be made clean forever. And though we grow cold, his love for us never fades. The God who spoke everything into being loves us with a love infinitely more vast than the universe.
I know that my words can only do so little – but I will pray that you will know the incredible love of God. Ponder the cross, and place your soul upon the words of God – “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
With the love of Christ,
Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade;
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.
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