Being Loved

God threw Himself at me yesterday.

Over the weekend, I forgot who I was. I gave up on my life – that is, the life Jesus calls me to live. I forgot who God is, and how He made me. I forgot who Christ is, and how He died for me. I forgot about the Holy Spirit, and how He lives inside me. It was a pathetic, disheartening, detaching experience.

I have been struggling with depression and frustration lately. Three months ago, my ex-fiancée became my ex-girlfriend, and we haven’t communicated since. The idea was that we each ought to seek God rather than each other. That has proven to be somewhere between difficult and impossible for me, depending on the day. I want to be with her so much that I can’t dwell on anything else. I believe that God brought us together, but I am absolutely and painfully unable to trust Him with things as they are. I want to be able to believe that He will bring us together in the end, maybe even with the caveat of “if it is His will” (though often I feel like I want Him to bring us together even if it’s not His will), but I seem incapable of it. Furthermore, I don’t live like I deserve to get her back anyway, so I really have no grounds on which to complain. But…I can’t dwell on that anymore here, since that’s not really my focus in writing this.

That was to frame things. I’ve been depressed, anxious, and angry, and then on top of that I’ve been unable to put aside this habitual sin that has plagued me for a whole decade and then some. I didn’t feel far from God this weekend, I felt nothing. It felt like God and I were in two different universes, or perhaps that God was nowhere at all.

Yet, “He is not far from each one of us.”

I had no idea what yesterday was going to be like. Three and a half days off work, combined with my spiritual numbness, had effectively ruined my life. I knew I had to get back to God, but I didn’t even know where to begin. I had thrown Him away, and I didn’t know how to get Him back.

I didn’t have to – didn’t have to know, and didn’t have to get Him back. He came after me.

The first thing he addressed was my sin. I’ve been posting a series of posts on a private blog specifically addressing my struggle with this sin, taking a scripture daily and elaborating on its application to this battle. Somehow, I knew beforehand that yesterday’s verse would be convicting and would cut right to my heart. It was the 48th day of this post series, in which I had exhorted myself and others to combat our sin using the weapon of Scripture, and here I had gone and discarded all of the advice I had been giving and fallen right back into my wickedness. Who am I to give advice on defeating sin, when I myself can’t follow it?

Forty-nine days ago, I took a set of 72 passages that I had found in my past few months’ Bible study and ordered them randomly, planning out the days on which I would post about each scripture. Somehow, God knew which one needed to be the 48th. It was 1 Corinthians 4:1-4, where verse 2 gently reminds us that stewards – disciples entrusted with the Mystery of Christ – need to be trustworthy. There was the incision. I had been anything but faithful with my charge. Paul then noted that it is not man nor even self that judges, only God. Paul was okay with this, because he was pretty confident he’d been doing things all right. I, on the other hand, lamented at how God must think of me now after what I’d done. More on this to come.

Second, I got home from work to find an unbelievable gift in the mailbox. I can’t say for sure whether it was placed there by the postal service or the hand of God Himself. Inside a thick-feeling envelope was a copy of the latest issue of the recently-developed magazine CONSP!RE, a project of Shane Claiborne (from The Simple Way, among other things) and Darin Petersen (from Relational Tithe, which is actually why I received this magazine). I hadn’t subscribed to this book, though I had read previous issues and found the content promising and interesting, if not always particularly gripping at the time. This issue, though, hit me like a ton of bricks as soon as I slid it out of the envelope. “Becoming Fire: On How – and How Not – to Pray.” Coinciding with my emotional and spiritual turbulence lately has been a certain inadequacy, inauthenticity, stagnation in my prayer life. Prayer life is more than me asking God for stuff – I still occasionally got that far. Prayer life is connection with God. Prayer, for me, is where God feels more real and more close than most other times. If I feel fake and distant, I’m not likely to even try to pray, because it doesn’t feel like I want it to due to my issues. What narcissism…I can’t pray unless I feel it. And yet, this is exactly why God had to throw Himself at me. I wasn’t going to come back to Him until I felt it. He decided to tell me not to put it off.

I read the first couple of articles in the magazine, then had to go to my Tuesday night men’s Bible study (which was a blessing in itself, just in the fellowship and reconnection with my local piece of the Body and the opportunity to return to God’s Word), then read a bit more once I got home. There are several great pieces, several insightful reflections on what prayer is, isn’t, can be, should be. I needed this book. I needed it at that time. And it was there.

God still loves me, even when I stray far from what I know He wants for me. God is disappointed, yet still merciful. God already knew all my sin, and loved me anyway. God will never give up on me like I do on Him. God will never leave me so that we can work things out separately. God will never tell me I’m not good enough for Him – even though, really, we both know that’s true. No one is good enough for Him…and yet, no one isn’t good enough for Him either.

I need God. I need God more than I need reconnection with my ex-girlfriend, no matter how desperate I feel. I need Him now.

He is there.

He is here.