By his wounds

I have taken my time about writing this blog, some 4 months in fact, partly because it has been so hard to put what happened into words even when talking it over with friends and partly because of the sheer preciousness of it, which has made me want to hold it close and share it sparingly. It’s still as precious and as hard to articulate, but I have decided to attempt to write about it.

From January to April this year I was very, very unwell. Perhaps as unwell as I have ever been. Certainly dangerously unwell. Something happened in January which for most would have come under the heading of life sucks and rubbish things happen, cry, lick your wounds and move on. With my special brand of emotional volatility combined with acute sensitivity to rejection it caused an injury that disabled me for months, that but for the event I am going to share here would probably still be disabling me today.

I experienced a rejection, one that I was aware was largely constructed in my own head, rather than in reality, but a profound one nonetheless. A thoughtless and rather serious mistake was made, I felt rejected and as a result as though someone had hollowed me out with an icecream scoop of any self-worth or identity I had ever possessed. Intellectually I could tell myself that my worth was in the way Christ saw me and treated me rather than in the way other people did, but in my heart there was a void that proclaimed my nothingness, constantly, agonisingly.

While I was with others often the emptiness could be covered over, distracted or temporarily filled with their love and regard, but as soon as I was alone it would drain away through the still open wound of rejection and I would be beset with obsessive, intrusive, relentless thoughts of ending my life to make it all stop.

I felt mortally wounded, beyond help. Objectively I knew the insanity of it, that my reaction was ridiculous, insane, utterly sinful. That I was taking man’s judgement, and in my better moments I knew not even an accurate version of that, over God’s judgement of me and allowing it to rule my emotions to the point of incapacitation.

I prayed, wrestled, cried out for the strength to believe, to subdue my fierce idolatrous emotions, to hear God’s voice over my own and the world’s, but I was failing, drowning. I checked into a secure crisis inpatient facility for 10 days, and spent the time reading the Bible, journaling, sleeping and praying, forcing myself to eat regularly, although I had by then fasted to the point that eating had become painful. I left feeling a fragile peace, hoping I was on the way to recovery but within a week I was back rocking on the brink of desperation and suicide.

My relationships were all profoundly dysfunctional at this point, I needed the affirmation of others to keep re-filling my leaking self-worth and when my evident illness meant that I received the opposite at times it pushed me further towards the edge. Criticism and judgement, explicit, implied or imagined, filled me with incandescent rage and despair, I was building an infinitely fragile meaning for my life on my ability to do things for others, and anybody who threatened that was my terrible enemy. I knew it was all wrong but I felt completely powerless to stop it, I would try to fill the emptiness with the knowledge of God’s love but it would leak out, just as my friends’ love and care did, rapidly, through the jagged tear of rejection.

It felt pointless to talk about it, many around me probably didn’t know it was happening, or were maybe aware that I was unwell as I said so, but didn’t have any idea of the daily battle against self-destruction that I was fighting. Occasionally it would all explode as a torrent of rage and pain, meeting a range of responses from a completely understandable baffled helplessness in the face of my intractable feelings, to a compassionate understanding. One particular friend, who has my gratitude would poke fun relentlessly at my irrationality, which is a risky strategy, but happens for me to be an excellent way to de-escalate my turbid emotions.

In any case, I had been some months trapped, bleeding and not healing. I had sought refuge continuously, physically, spiritually, and found none beyond short, temporary moments. I would say I was at the end of my resources, but I had been living there for months, somehow day by day finding enough determination to fight when I felt there was nothing left to fight with and choose to live rather than die, to obey at least in that, to love God and others at least that much, little though it was.

I had been out of the crisis centre about a week when things had cycled up to the point they had been at before I had checked in and I was once more screaming internally with rage and pain as I lay in bed at night. I lashed out viciously by messenger, and not for the first time, at the person I blamed for the situation and felt shame but some small relief. And as I lay there, still in scalding fury and intense pain, relentlessly thinking about acting upon the urges to take my life, I once again cried out to the Lord. At first in anger, and then in humble, desperate faith, from ‘why won’t you help me and why did you let this happen,’ to, ‘I believe you have the power to change this, to heal me, to bring change.’

And then it happened. He came. He was there in the room with me. The risen Lord Jesus stood beside my bed. And just as once before he had said to Thomas he said to me, “Reach out and touch my side, touch my wounds.” I was full of wonder but not afraid. I did what he said. And as I reached out my hand to touch his side he said, “This is how much I love you.”

I felt it immediately, I understood what he meant. This, these wounds, this is how much I love you. I loved you to the cross, I loved you to death, I loved you to blood and agony. This is how much I love you. It flowed into me, his love, and blew away everything before it but what was like itself, good and holy and loving and lovely. It filled me from head to toes, as physical as my own terrible emotions had been a short time before, as gentle as they were violent but oh, so much more powerful. I was loved. I wept a little and rested in his love for a while. Then with curiosity, like the way we pick a scar or prod a bruise I looked at the thoughts that moments before had created the negative emotions that had ripped through me with such power. I saw them clearly, could acknowledge the wrong done to me, the sin of my response, I felt a gentle compassion for the wounds but there was no power in any of it to hurt me whilst I had his love. I had seen my Lord, I had reached out and touched his wounds, felt his love and there was no longer anything in the present, past of future, real though all of it was, that could cause me pain.

Sin against me had lost its power to harm, and in that moment sin had lost all its savour for me. It held no attractions, it had nothing to offer compared to the love that I possessed. I understood for the first time a puzzle that had occasionally bothered me in the past, how, given all that we suffer in this life and that we would remember it in heaven, would it not cause us pain? I understood then that we would remember sin and suffering, it would not become less evil or cease to matter but it would have no power to cause us pain when seen from the perfect safety and loving presence of our God.

This is the bit where my words fail me. I can’t quite convey the experience in language, it seems inadequate to express it. How can I describe a love that I have never felt humanly in human language? How can I explain how it did what it did? I can’t explain, I can only tell you and promise you that it is true, when I came face to face with the risen Christ and saw his wounds and felt his love, sin was in that moment utterly defeated in me and suffering lost its power to cause me pain. I experienced a taste of the promises of heaven but I am as defeated as the New Testament writers to explain how it is that the troubles and sin that press on us so heavily here will seem light and momentary there, and simply say that it is true and that it is by the love of the crucified and risen Christ that it is true.

I had no expectation that the feeling would last. It seemed clear to me from the outset that this was a short sojourn in heaven, meant to heal and equip me to persevere with life here, not a permanent ‘high’ to allow me to float above the troubles of life. Heaven is for the future, when he calls us home, and in this life we must have many troubles and much suffering. But there has been much fruit from the gift. Firstly, the wound was healed. The love of Christ I experienced was so great it utterly destroyed the lie that I was worthless. How could I be worthless when I had been loved like that? His wounds, the real, concrete, torn flesh evidence of his love for me, had healed me from the wounds of the rejection of man.

From that moment I began to get better. What I had known in my head I had experienced in my heart and although there may be many other feelings to work through as a result of what had happened, many other battles to fight and sins to slay and truths to choose to believe, at that point, my soul and mind had been healed stronger than it had been before it sustained the injury. Secondly, I now have a lasting and more tangible hope in which to lean in moments of despair. I have tasted the joy of the presence and love of my Lord. If I persevere until the end it will be mine eternally. When tempted by sin, or suffering now I can lean back upon the memory of when I tasted and saw that the Lord was good, when I understood, not only in my head but by my emotions the love that is expressed in his wounds.

In the eye of the beholder

I hate photographs. I know I am not the only one, and these days, for the sake of others who want to capture memories I submit without too much open protest to being photographed in groups. Friends who know me well are merciful these days and usually don't insist too much if I quietly demur or offer to take the picture in group situations. I still occasionally have friends who find it hard to believe that I really don't like it or who with the best of intentions will send me photos of myself.

To close friends I am often brave enough to admit now that, at the wrong moment, unexpectedly being confronted with a picture of myself will make me feel physically sick. That's not hyperbole. Literally, physically, sick. Independent really of the situation or my relative appearance. I don't see what they see when they look at the photograph and they don't realise that I only manage to exist and enjoy my life because I constantly, consciously don't think about what I look like. Being confronted with a picture reminds me that other people have to look at and relate to what I physically look like all the time.

It's why I hate any occasion for which I need to get dressed up. I have to think about what I look like, the physical me that people have to relate to. In order to start enjoying myself I have to get to the point where I have 'lost' myself again, when I can forget that I physically exist and what it is that people are looking at when they look at me. Being dressed up also often involves fitted clothes which constantly remind you of their existence. It lies behind my insistence that if I ever get married I will do so in jeans and with no photographer. The wedding dress is the ultimate expression of clothing that is designed to focus attention on your appearance. Most of my friends don't really understand the extent of the misery and discomfort looking at myself causes me, so they don't understand why I would be willing to sacrifice convention, propriety and being the centre of attention in order to avoid constantly being reminded on a supposedly happy day what it is that others are looking at.

Self-image is so wrapped up in layers and layers of shame for me, that I am reluctant to admit how I feel about what I look like. I am ashamed of my shame. So over the years I have cultivated deliberate self-forgetfulness. Forget about what you look like, dismiss the thought, consciously reject thinking of yourself as a physical person, or in fact thinking about yourself at all and then you don't have to be self-conscious, you can be focussed on others. Photos, mirrors, reflections in shop windows, getting dressed up, thrust that physicality back onto you and you have to push it away, reject it again before you can be comfortable. I can never accept myself, only forget myself.

I know I am relatively extreme, but not unique in any sense. It is an aggravated degree of something many people, particularly women, experience all the time. As humans we are constantly bombarded with messages about who we are. From the subconscious clues of the way people relate to us, to the images and representations that surround us, to the actual words that people use to describe us. We absorb and assimilate expectations, judgements. We are constantly being told who we are and who we should be by the world around us. Physical self-image is bound up with moral judgements on ourselves, when I look in the mirror I don't just see what I physically look like and the accompanying physical judgements, I see all of the world's judgements and my own judgement's reflected back at me.

Until I was 22 or so, those judgements would be profoundly uncomfortable for a stranger to listen to. Physically what I saw was ugly, disgusting, unfeminine. More generally I was worthless, dirty, unloved and un-loveable. I had absorbed the world's judgements about myself. Self-mutilation was easy, self-disgust could fuel days and days of not eating. I wanted to cut my face, to write the judgements I had absorbed in plain sight for others to see, to destroy what I loathed and made me feel sick. I managed not to do that, in the end my shame at how I felt overcame the desire for public exposure of it.

I know this makes uncomfortable reading. It makes uncomfortable writing. So why am I writing it? Because of course it is not the whole story, only the beginning of it. I am friends with Jesus so it's where I start, but not where I end. The world told me a story that if I wanted to be loved I needed to, "Be beautiful, Be funny, Be smart but not too smart, Be successful, Be smiley, Be popular, Be fashionable, Be desirable, Be thin, Be quiet". And then it told me I was none of those things. I was a failure. But praise God he took me in hand and told me a different story. It was a simple one, just this, "You are mine".

It's the claim to silence all claims. The judgement to end all judgements. What and who I am is not the world's to determine, it belongs to God to say. He made me, then he bought me with the blood of his precious Son, only he is worthy to tell me who I am. His is not another voice in the competition of voices telling me who I am, his is the voice. Only he is worthy to tell me who I am. To allow that right to anyone else, including myself, is to dishonour and de-throne him. It may not have been my fault, the things that happened to me that created the voices of judgement in my head, but that I allow them to sound above the Lord's voice, to take his place, and of that I need to repent.

So having allowed that the Lord has the right to define me, to tell me who I am, what is it that he says? Does he have another list for me of things I need to be? No, the Lord Jesus had for me words that would set me free from the weight of the judgement of the world. Isaiah 43 became the scaffolding on which I could start to re-build my identity, re-shape my view of myself into the reflection of who the God made me and died for me told me I was. "Because you are precious and honoured in my sight, and because I love you", began to replace the solid foundational truths of my understanding of myself. I could not be worthless if God said I was precious, I could not be dirty if I was honoured, I could not be unloved if my Lord said, "I surely love you".

Over time the rock of Jesus' words about me became more and more the foundation stone of my identity, I gave up more and more of my judgements of myself to him. I accepted myself because I believed I was accepted, not on the basis of my merits, but by the love that said while you are dirty and guilty and my enemy I will lay down my life for you. On the basis that, "This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be a propitiation for our sins". It's not a completed work, it never will be this side of heaven, there are days that I hear the world's voice as the loudest in my head, coping strategies that I run back to under pressure that reflect the old identity rather than the new.

One thing that remains is the visceral antipathy to my physical appearance. The belief that I am ugly and disgusting and weak because I am overweight, the only thing that I see when I look at a photo, or a reflection. The constant battles with dieting which, like for most people, has absolutely no long term impact. The constant reminder that when it comes to physical appearance I am a failure and it's my own fault, a failure of will, self-discipline, inner strength. I am learning to tame the excesses it leads to. I no longer often skip meals, starving myself part in punishment, part in desperate attempt to make an impact. It never worked anyway. I try to at least start the academic year with the concept that time to cook and eat in my life is a necessity, not an indulgence that I don't deserve. I buy fruit and vegetables that I like, even though it seems like a waste of money to spend on myself, because I am more likely to eat them. I try to remember that however I feel about it, my body is not my own, because I am not my own, I was bought at a price, so I try to take care of it.

But I know the Lord is pushing me on. Challenging me to see not what the world sees, or what I see, but what he sees when he looks at me. Not perfect, not worthy in itself, but acceptable because he accepts it, lovely because it is loved, beautiful because he has found beauty in it, the beauty that he has put there by choosing to love it and therefore giving it some of his own worth and beauty. Pushing me to believe that the inner things are more important than the outer, the unseen is of more value than the seen, that charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting, but that a women who fears the Lord is to be praised.

I'm not there yet. I still hate photos, still struggle to look at them, but it no longer hurts to hear the verse a dear friend once gave to me inscribed on a bracelet and which I could not read for years and years because I couldn't accept it. Slowly, but slowly the Lord is changing even that deepest truth that I have believed from a small child, that I am ugly. Slowly I am letting him be the arbiter and learning to accept his words when he says: "The King is enthralled with your beauty, honour him for he is your Lord".

 

An unwanted gift?

You will probably have heard this testimony many times, you may even have told it - apologies if you have. It goes, "I used to struggle with singleness a lot but I came to a point where I was really content and trusting God with it and that was when so and so came along and now I'm happily married with 10 children".

I have exaggerated it slightly but I can't count the number of times I heard a version of that story when I was in my 20s. I have two major problems with this story. The first is that it seems to hold out marriage as some sort of prize for sorting yourself out with God when it comes to singleness. Just get yourself in a place where you are content and God will give you what you really want. It's a recipe for self-deception or despair. And it doesn't seem to me to be accurate to life. I know loads of people who idolise marriage and/or struggled with singleness deeply up until the very moment they met their husband-to-be. I also know many who seem entirely at peace with their singleness who remain resolutely unwed. The second reason I dislike it is that it frankly seems smug, however it is intended. I am all sorted and have earned my married bliss, your singleness is really all your fault - be more holy and you'll get what you want.

I know it is meant as an encouragement to people to focus on contentment in the Lord but I honestly don't think its a useful way of doing it. It seems cruel in some ways, which God never is - here is a challenge, stop wanting what you want and maybe I will give it to you. There is a truth behind it, God in his kindness often withholds things we want that are bad for us because we want them in idolatrous ways but God's desire in withholding an idol is that we learn to want God more, not to squash our desires down in the hope God will think we have them under control enough to give us a husband.

I actually rarely hear this these days, as I grow older. Mostly I think because a couple of years into marriage most people start to realise they are not as sorted as they would like to think. The old idolatries are often still there below the surface once reality hits and marriage is tough and tiring, it no longer seems like something to brag about so much. These people are more likely to tell you how hard marriage is in response to your singleness angst - sorry guys, equally unhelpful to the struggling single.

So what is the answer to helping singles in their hurt. First you can recognise that there is a pain in feeling unchosen and unwanted. The best thing you can do for your single friends is to love them and welcome them into your home. I have been so incredibly blessed by married friends who have included me as part of their family. Where life doesn't stop when I come round, we play together with the children, join in bath and bedtime routines, muck in and help around the house. An hour at the house of a friend like this is worth a million words of encouragement. The second thing is to point them relentlessly to the God who has chosen them and wanted them. Who chose them before the creation of the world, who chose them to be his dearly loved children, who chose them as his bride, who chose them for blessing.

And the God who numbers their days and the hairs on their heads, who has good plans, whatever they may be. For me this was the final hurdle of contentment with singleness. I realised that the fact that I was single wasn't due to any personal lack in me, an inadequacy or unattractiveness, but because God had chosen it for my good. That took away the last sting of bitterness in singleness and set me free to enjoy all that it gives me.

Which brings me to the reason for my post. I love my singleness. I love the freedom it gives me to serve God, to love my friends, to have time for people, to do the job I love. I love the fact I don't have to negotiate the details of daily life with someone else in time-consuming compromises. I love the fact that if God was to say tomorrow, get up and leave Oxford and go here, I could just do it. No worries about jobs or schools or houses. Which gives God the possibility of doing just that. How exciting. So having reached a point where I not only don't fear singleness, but enjoy it how should I approach the possibility of being asked to surrender it?

At the moment this is still a hypothetical question but one which circumstances have pushed me to ask. And the answer is surprising. I am beginning to wonder if the purpose for which God has been preparing me by dealing with my difficulties with singleness is not marriage - but here's a controversial thought - singleness itself. Do I move from a place where I answer the relationship question with 'of course I would love a family if it is God's will for me,' to 'I feel I am right where God wants me to be in my life right now and I'm really not looking to change that.' In some senses it doesn't matter of course except that it affects how I treat men who seem to be interested in me. Many, many people have and would urge me to make the most of every opportunity to show a man I like I am interested in him, to accept someone who offers as long as I like him and he loves Jesus, to not close the door on opportunities, as if my aim was to find 'the man'. But I am in a place where I am not sure I want 'the man' at all. I certainly don't need a man to tell me who I am or my value, and I am not sure a husband would make me more fruitful in the ministry I feel called to, in fact I'm pretty sure it would make me less.

Even as I write this there is that nagging question at the back of my mind - are you a lunatic? Are you really saying that the world - including the Christian world - is wrong when they pity the single and strive after marriage? Are you really saying that you can choose singleness and childlessness with all its consequences later in life? Are you sure that the conviction today that you are where God wants you will feel quite such a good basis for making this decision in 30 years time? Those doubts are there but so is the fierce love of where God has me and what I am doing for his kingdom now. Things I wouldn't be able to do if I take the path of marriage. And the conviction that I don't need to be afraid. God has loved and chosen me and in heaven I will experience that so fully that missing out on the marriage experience here on earth with seem absolutely weightless compared with the satisfaction of having lived obediently and in dependence on him.

I don't know for sure which way this will go. God may bring someone along and make it absolutely clear that I should change my mind and marry them, and that I can be fruitful in that marriage in a way that I can't now as a single and that he wants me to be. But for the moment I am looking straight down the barrel of the possibility that the story I started this post with can have another ending, and that maybe for the sake of the church, a few of us should choose that ending, "I used to struggle with singleness a lot but I came to a point where I was really content and trusting God with it and now I am perfectly and peacefully content with my singleness and thank God for it and the opportunities it gives me and wouldn't want it to change."

Chosen

I won’t be the only one who finds the experience of rejection difficult or perceives it in places where it doesn’t really exist, but I learnt a long time ago that I couldn’t let the feeling of being rejected pass unchallenged. Rejection often feels a lot like being cut with a knife, small ones are like paper cuts, for me there are dozens of tiny ones every day and they build up over the week until I hurt all over and every new one is agony. Bigger rejections feel like someone has stabbed me in the guts. Often the rejection is totally unintentional or even imagined, or a consequence of a seriously unrealistic desire for intimacy and belonging in places or with people where I feel safe.

Whatever the cause I have become adept at applying gospel first aid to feelings of rejection, in the knowledge that if I don’t, sooner or later I will become completely incapacitated by the anger or more usually, the swirling sense of emptiness and pain. Reason and reality don’t make much of an impact on raw emotions, they feel like a rebuke and make me feel helpless. Yes, I know perfectly well that I am not justified in feeling rejected in this situation, that I am probably imagining things, that people have limitations and a hundred other reasons why my feelings are unjustified. Which is why most of my friends will hopefully not even know that I feel them, I do my absolute best to hide how hurt I am most of the time, knowing that it is utterly unfair. But the feelings exist and they exist all the time and knowing they are wrong and unfair and out of proportion doesn’t make them go away. It just makes me feel ashamed of feeling them.

So like I say - gospel first aid. “I have loved you,” says the Lord, “I will never leave you or forsake you”, “you are precious in my sight”. Quick prayer, “Lord Jesus please help me.” Repeat over and over until you calm down and perspective and/or your sense of humour snaps back in. In my experience the emotion of rejection can only be quelled by a stronger emotion of safety and security in Christ.

So that’s all fine, except maybe I want to live in a world where I’m not constantly doing first aid. Maybe I particularly don’t want to live in a world where occasionally a toxic mix of exhaustion and rejection produce hysterical panic or overwhelming anger and consequent stupid and dangerous behaviour because it gets beyond my first aid skills.

One possibility I am exploring this week, suggested by a very helpful friend, is to look at the Bible and spend time investigating what it means to be chosen by God. I know from experience that finding a truth to speak day by day into my heart can bring real change to difficult emotions. I’m hoping that it might be possible to find such a deep and abiding sense of acceptance and belonging in Christ that I am protected from the intensity of my feelings of rejection by people.

I have been looking over all the places where the Bible talks about being chosen and have picked out the following themes and verses to meditate on:

We are chosen to receive

This is the most common reference to being chosen in the Bible. God has chosen us in order to pour out his love and blessings. I have found 30 things that we have been chosen in order to receive, including freedom, deliverance, mercy, victory, purpose, peace, joy, glory and gloriously, the Holy Spirit. Most powerfully for me, we have been chosen to be loved.

Romans 8 is my favourite ‘chosen to receive’ reference, it spells out in detail the extent of the cost and the consequences of God’s choice to love me. Because I am chosen I cannot ever be rejected or condemned or separated from the love of Christ. It is a well of acceptance and love that can never run dry. It has been purchased for me so abundantly and at such a cost that all I ever need bring are my empty hands to receive it.

³¹ What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? ³² He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? ³³ Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. ³⁴ Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. ³⁵ Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? ³⁶ As it is written:

“For your sake we face death all day long;

 we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”

³⁷ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. ³⁸ For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, ³⁹ 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.

We are chosen to belong

To me, the most precious way we are chosen is to belong to God’s family. We are told throughout the old and new testaments that we are chosen to be children, to be adopted, to be God’s people, to be God’s possession and to be on God’s side. I hunger after secure relationships, to belong, to be safe, to have a place where I will never be turned away. I hunger after relationships in a way that I know in my mind can never be fulfilled by people. But God can give me what I need. He can satisfy that hunger, he alone has the resources and the capacity to provide the love and intimacy that I crave. We are children, chosen to be a treasured possession. I belong to God and to his people. Deuteronomy 14:1-2 declares this very clearly – along with a very specific application!

You are the children of the Lord your God. Do not cut yourselves or shave the front of your heads for the dead, ² for you are a people holy to the Lord your God. Out of all the peoples on the face of the earth, the Lord has chosen you to be his treasured possession.

We are chosen to become

God chooses us just as we are but he doesn’t choose us to leave us just as we are. We are promised in many places that we are chosen in order to be made more like Jesus, to bear fruit, to be holy, to love. This is a precious truth. I am not stuck in my sin and idolatry, I am free to change, to grow, to flourish. This is how I know that I am not wasting my time trying to learn these truths, change is not just possible, but if I keep walking with Christ it is inevitable.

John 15:16-17

You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. ¹⁷ This is my command: Love each other.

Colossians 3:12

¹² Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.

We are chosen to proclaim

Finally we are chosen to proclaim. We receive and belong and become so that we at last are able to give. Give hope, give peace, give forgiveness, give compassion, give truth, give love, give Christ.

1 Peter 2:9-10

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. ¹⁰ Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

I am chosen, before the creation of the world he saw me and knew me and chose me. He said I want you, you are mine, you belong to me. I choose you to love you, to pour out my overflowing blessings upon you, to give you everything you don’t deserve, simply because I want to. I choose you to purify you, to make you whole, to fill you with love and beauty that shines from the inside. And when I am done with you, you will be so loved and so lovely that others will look upon you and praise me.

This is the truth I need to face the manifold and constant rejections of life. The truth that can sing to my heart when my brain has stopped working, when reason is overwhelmed and nothing makes sense any more. This is the truth that we all need. God grant us the power to learn it.