Embracing God's Love
Honestly, I am not one for New Year’s Resolutions, mainly because I often give up on them fairly quickly. I am a perfectionist so I often take an all-or-nothing approach to resolutions and goals and so when I fail, I often just give up. For instance, I keep telling myself I am going to exercise for an hour a day. Mind you, I barely exercise for 10 minutes a day, so to go from that to an hour seems a bit unrealistic, at least initially.
Or the ever elusive: “I’m going to give up on all candy and sugar and just eat healthy food.” That seems a bit unrealistic considering how much I love eating and drinking sugar. It might be more helpful if I slowly started adding more healthy foods and slowly decreased my sugar intake. But nope, I want to do things perfectly and the first time, so I often set myself up for failure. New year’s resolutions are often just another reminder of what I believe to be my lack of discipline.
But this year I’ve decided to take a slightly different track. I have decided to substantially lower my expectations and the pressure I put on myself to improve myself or to make myself better. Yes, I am fully aware I’m not perfect and that there are plenty of things I should do to improve myself but this year, I just want to focus on God’s love. I want to learn to embrace God’s love for me on a daily basis. And this means taking small steps to show myself love and compassion.
Growing up I was not taught to love myself. My mother’s love was limited and conditional, and ever-changing. And the God I was taught to believe in, loved me, in spite of me. I was taught that we humans were so horrible and sinful, that we deserved to be tortured for all eternity in hell, but that hey, God was so good and generous, God loved us anyway.
In fact, this God loved us so much that they came down to earth and were brutally murdered in our place. This understanding of God’s love emphasized the worthlessness of humanity. And when you are told again and again at home and at church, that you aren’t in fact worthy of love and you are a burden, that carries with you. Not to mention that I was also queer, and had been taught that being queer was an affront to God and was more evidence of my sinful nature.
But even after moving away from toxic family members and that congregation, and even after refuting that theology, I have still believed the lies that I have been told: that I am a burden, that I am difficult to love. Don’t get me wrong, I am not everyone’s cup of tea and some people find my opinionated attitude to be off-putting. And that’s ok. But my issue is that I would view the fact that some people may not like me as evidence of that unlovability.
So this year, I am focusing on loving myself. On embracing that God’s love for me knows no bounds. That I am loved beyond any shadow of a doubt and that I do bring a lot to my communities. I do not just take from others, but I also give. I want to spend this year remembering that nothing can separate me from God’s love-whether that is the many outside forces that try to tell me that because I am queer and nonbinary I am an abomination to God. Or whether it is the inside voices that regurgitate the lies that I have been told about how unlovable I am.
And I know that I am not the only person to struggle with loving myself. I see it on a daily basis on my social media accounts. People who on the surface seem so sure of themselves: who are convinced that their faith is right, that their interpretation of scripture is right, and yet continue to preach a God whose love is limited and conditional.
They not only try to convince others that they have to earn God’s love and change, but they also believe that about themselves. It's very easy to worship a God who views humanity as horrible, sinful beings worthy of eternal torment if that’s how one view oneself. For those who view God’s love as conditional, I truly pray that you can be fully open to God’s radical love. Perhaps then, you can let go of the need to deny parts of who they are and the need to convince others to hide and deny who they are to please a cruel God.
I also see people who are in the process of deconstructing their faith and getting rid of toxic beliefs, and yet the idea that they aren’t worth loving is one that is hard to fully get rid of. In the back of their mind, they still worry that they are ultimately unlovable and that God and others could never love them for who they are.
I want those of you who are deconstructing to know that your worries, and your concerns, are heard. The trauma you suffered at the hands of the institutional church, individual Christians, and even family members is not your fault. You were never unlovable. You were never at fault. The people who hurt you, didn’t know how to love themselves, and so they turned that self-hatred outward, and you bore the brunt of their self-loathing. You deserved better.
And this year, I invite you to join me in the long and necessary process of letting go of the lies we were fed by toxic theology and toxic family members. Join me in remembering and embracing God’s love for us. God delights in me. God delights in you. God delights in us. We aren’t giant burdens to be discarded but beloved children that God embraces.
No, we aren’t perfect, but we also aren’t broken discarded pieces of trash. We are loved just as we are. This year let’s embrace that love. It’s hard to shut down the voices within ourselves telling us that we are not loved, but let’s try and slowly replace that voice with the voice of God, who whispers to us every day that we are precious, we are important, we are beloved.
Let’s try to ignore the outside voices of those who preach a God of limited love because they can’t imagine that anyone, including God could love them so wildly, that they instead are trying to get all of us to believe in a God whose love is conditional. Let’s reject that god.
And here’s the thing: there’s no failing this ‘resolution,’ God’s love will always be there. And there will always be unlimited opportunities to embrace God’s love.
I don’t know what this New Year holds. Probably a mixture of joy, scary and frightening national/global events, and personal tragedies and trials. But what I do know is that God is with us and that nothing-not the world falling apart, not the hateful words of others, not our own self-loathing, can ever separate us from God’s love.
Image: Fireworks. Text: I don’t know what this New Year holds. Probably a mixture of joy, scary and frightening national/global events, and personal tragedies and trials. But what I do know is that God is with us and that nothing-not the world falling apart, not the hateful words of others, not our own self-loathing, can ever separate us from God’s love.
Image: I don’t know what this New Year holds. Probably a mixture of joy, scary and frightening national/global events, and personal tragedies and trials. But what I do know is that God is with us and that nothing-not the world falling apart, not the hateful words of others, not our own self-loathing, can ever separate us from God’s love.