I Knew It From the Start

February 11, 2009

A childhood friend posted this photo on her Facebook page. That’s me on the right in my preschool Sunday School class. I was four years old and looking rather snappy, if I do say so myself and I will, in my fluffy white cotton knit sweater and skirt and shiny black patent leather Mary Janes.

I remember every detail of that class room. The black speckled linoleum flooring, the coat racks hung right at eyeball piercing height, and the U-shaped tables with hinges on one edge so they could be lifted up and hooked to the wall to make room for enthusiastic children to march round and round in clumsy circles during song time armed with bells, sandpaper rubbing blocks, and tambourines. Do you see the light wooden chairs in the photo? I managed to snag one of them when the church was doing a remodel years ago and I still have it, along with another chair from my kindergarten class. The four year old class was in the basement by the gym. The kindergarten class was at the other end of the church and up one flight of stairs between the nursery babies and the grade school big kids class room. When you made it to that hallway, you were in the big leagues.

Here’s something else I remember. I remember knowing as sure as I knew anything, and being four years old I was nothing if not a wealth of information, that God loved me. I had no doubt. God was smitten by me. Not only God but Jesus. They both loved me so much someone had even written a song about it. “Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so.” Oh sure, other kids sang it too but I really knew that when we sang it Jesus was right there in all his invisible glory winking right in my direction.

I already told you how I always saw myself as the little lamb wrapped gently around the shoulders of Jesus in a needlepoint picture my grandma had made for me. I wasn’t in the sheep herd milling and munching grass behind the stone wall or even one of the few sheep privileged to stand in the shade of the Shepherd’s shadow. No. I was the lamb. The lamb around his shoulders. The lamb he’d left all the others to find.

When it came to Jesus I always just assumed that I was special to him and I never doubted God’s love.

Never.

Seriously. Not for a minute. Not when my face broke out and my adolescent hormones raged and rebelled. Not when I was held captive on a roller-coaster ride of self-worth and self-loathing. Not when I felt like I was a failure because I didn’t do this or that good enough. Not when I went through my own dark night of the soul, otherwise known as clinical depression. Not when I was stunned with the realization I was a lesbian. Not when friends abandoned me, the church rejected me, and my family didn’t know what to do with me. Through every moment in my life, the marvelous and the messy, I knew that I knew that I knew God loved me.

I can’t tell you why I’ve never questioned or had a doubt about God’s love. I mean, it’s not as though I am or ever was a Spiritual Wonder Woman though the idea of wearing a cape and a snappy super hero utility belt intrigues the bejeebies out of me, and as to my prayer life it would impress no one and I’m no deeper in the things of God than the hole the dog dug.  I can’t even write it off to being a blessing since it would make no sense  God would reserve such assurance for me when so many others have been plagued with doubt and despair that God’s love for them has somehow been diminished or removed as a result of being gay or any other such thing.

But I’m not just sure of God’s love for me. I’m just as absolutely sure to the bone of God’s love for you. You see, if God’s unconditional love doesn’t include you, then it includes no one, not the holiest saint or the scuzziest sinner. If divine love falters because of something you are or something you’ve done then God’s love is reduced to even less than human love at its very best. It’s tarnished and flawed, deficient and feeble.

But no. The love of God is anything but that. it is the one most true and sure thing; unconditional and unfailing, extravagant and boundless. It depends on nothing to be given because it was already in your back pocket before you ever owned a pair of pants or needed one. Before you were born you were God’s beloved and the love that embraced you within your mother’s womb is the same love that holds you now, the very same love that has never left you unattended for even the most fleeting of minutes in your life. When you went where you knew you shouldn’t have gone and did what you wished you could take back, that same love was there. When you were lonely, grieving, confused, resentful, furious or fearful, that same love was there. Always there. Never wavering. Never more. Never less. When you were four and right now. Exactly now.

How do I know that God loves you so? I know it in my soul and it doesn’t hurt that the Bible tells me so…

I will be glad and rejoice in your love, for you saw my affliction and knew the anguish of my soul. Psalm 31:7

For great is your love toward  me…you, O Lord, are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness. Psalm 86:13-15

As high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His love for those who fear Him; as far as the east is from the west so far has He removed our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him; for He knows how we are formed, He remembers that we are dust. Psalm 103:8-14

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. Romans 8:38-39

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.
I John 3:1

In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. I John 4:9-12

Each Soul Completes Me is a translation by Daniel Ladinsky of an ancient poem by Hafiz. Can you imagine God speaking this to you?

My
Beloved said,

“My name is not complete without yours.”

I thought:
How could a human’s worth ever be such?

And God, knowing all our thoughts – and all our
thoughts are innocent steps on the path - then addressed my heart,
God revealed a sublime truth to the world,
when He sang,

“I am made whole by your life. Each soul,
each soul completes
me.”

I hope with all my heart you can.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Posted in Love and Grace, SnapShot Reflections