Growing up, upon hearing those words, my self-conscious always had to cock it's eyebrow. Not in a sarcastic way - more in, like, a hearing about some new age meditation thing from your hippie neighbor and you think it's a little absurd but you try to be a nice human all the time and just nod and smile and say something vague like "that's so interesting" or "yes, I think I heard about that on Ellen last week. She made fun about it and I laughed."
It wasn't that I didn't believe God doesn't teach us things. But I always thought that in order for me to be growing or to have God "teaching me" merited some inner God-to-Gabbie dialogue. I expected to hear the words of God in my head, which never happened, of course. I thought it happened to other people, maybe, or that I just wasn't a strong enough believer to have God imparting lessons on me. I wasn't to That Level; I was only a blue belt instead of a black one.
I thought that in order to learn anything about God or to have Him show me anything was a mystical voice from the sky like Moses' burning bush experience.
College has shown me just how wrong I was.
In just the past three weeks, God has been showing me so much. For the first time in my life, I truly believe that God is growing me and changing me. For the first time, I hear Him. And it's not a magical Morgan Freeman voice streaming into my brain.
It's from His word. Verses that strike my soul, the ones that pertain to exactly this moment in my life. It's the amazing young woman you meet at Church who is running after God and wants to help you tie your shoes for the race. It's the sermon series you're slowly but surely going through online that's just been waiting for you. It's the campus ministry preaching on the same exact thing all this other stuff was about - and your church and your sunday school and your college's chapel sessions and your floormate's testimony that strikes you to your core.
I am not even kidding.
It's amazing and terrifying all at once. You are real, God. Thank you. My God, thank you.
This lesson in itself is so amazing all in it's self, but I haven't even gotten to what He has been teaching me. It's a whole 'nother scoop of awesome in the banana split of Jesus.
Basically, for the first time in my life, I finally understand that God loves me.
I mean, I knew He did. It's a fact; they tell you it before you're old enough for Sunday school. It's a part of the whole shebang. Heck, I can sing "Jesus Loves Me" in two languages, one of which is with my hands. But I never understood what that love meant until now.
For the past year - and, really, the two years before that - I've simultaneously loved God and tried to pursue Him while believing that because of the sin I struggled with there was no way I was going to heaven. My sin was too great.
A girl who worshiped herself and hurt herself couldn't be a Christian.
There was no way God could love me. Not someone like me.
In the past three weeks God has shown me just how wrong I was. I wish there was a word stronger than "wrong" here because I. Was. So. Very. Dead. Wrong.
I don't have the space or the mental understanding/capacity to try to describe and explain all the words that God has literally been slamming into my soul (I don't think I could even describe the affect these words had on my mind), but I just wanted to share some verses with you that helped me realize how much God loves me. Us. You. An abhorrent sinner.
I don't usually paraphrase verses or pick out parts; I think verses should be read in context, but I'm going to be dropping lines from Isaiah 43 - 54 that just really opened my eyes.
"But thus says the Lord . . . 'Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.'"
"I, I am he
who blots our your transgressions for my own sake,
and I will not remember your sins."
" . . . but with everlasting love I will have compassion on
you," says the Lord, your Redeemer"
"For the mountains may depart
and the hills be removed,
but my steadfast love shall not depart from you"
"Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my
hands"
I never fully grasped what God's redemption meant. His mercy. His grace. His steadfast love which is unwavering, resolute, and enduring. Unending love.
I am going to say this directly to you, reader. If you are a follower of Christ I hope you can see the beauty that He has revealed to me.
God called you by name. You are His. You are not failed relationships. You will never be alone. You belong to the Creator of the Universe. He won't even remember your sins. He won't even remember. God has forgotten the guilt that made you hellbound and unclean. The mountains may fall and the hills collapse - the world may end - but you will always be loved and that love is perfect. You've got it for life, even when you're struggling with sin. You are engraved onto His hands. He has written you onto the hands that created every piece of the universe.
And that is beautiful.
"For the Lord comforts Zion;
he comforts all her waste places
and makes her wilderness like Eden
her desert like the garden of the Lord"
I am Zion, a waste place, desert with a wild and sinful heart.
He makes me beautiful. And He holds me in his palms tenderly in the hands that created volcanoes and galaxies and love.
And I was a fool to believe that my sin meant that God didn't love me. That my sin was too much for Him to forgive.
If you, even for one moment, believe that God can't or doesn't love you, please, please, please go read Isaiah. I'll leave you with this: Isaiah chapter 53, verse 2-5 which is about our redeemer Jesus Christ, who grew up from the dust, who wasn't beautiful, who was hated and despised, who was a man of sorrows and unmeasureable grief, who carries us, whose palms were pierced, who was crushed and torn apart so that you and I could have peace and be healed.
"For he grew up before him like a young plant,
and like a root out of dry ground;
he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
and no beauty that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men;
a man of sorrows, and aquatinted with grief . . .
Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows . . .
But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon his was the chastisement that brought us
peace,
and with his wounds we are healed."
We are A City Not Forsaken.
Isaiah 62: 12d
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