GOT love?

I was raised in a home where my mom constantly told me that I was loved, that I would always be loved, that love was unconditional - but the unspoken lifestyle was that whether or not I actually received that love was conditional based on my behavior, attitude, performance, etc. If I was "good", I got smiles and hugs and playful teasing and approving looks. If I was "bad" though, I got the cold shoulder, the silent treatment, or worst of all - disappointed looks and a frowning mouth. Since that was my entire childhood (being homeschooled until high school, I really had nothing to compare it to), I just naturally assumed that that was normal behavior. That anyone who ever interacted with me would treat me the same way. So, when I reached high school and later college, I spent a lot of energy guarding my heart from the people that I loved, from the dear friends who welcomed me so patiently and openly into their lives. On the outside I was totally fine and happy, and I accepted and reciprocated their love for me with gratitude and joy, but on the inside I was always being cautious, overanalyzing everything I said or did to make sure it would be pleasing to them, waiting for the other shoe to drop and for them to realize what a screw-up I am and retreat from me, taking their love and friendship with them. A couple of really fantastic guys in my life realized this (to some extent) in my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college and tried to show me that I really was loved and accepted for who I am, and I tried really hard to believe them... but I always held a little pocket of doubt in my heart, kind of as a safegaurd just in case they went back on their kind words. The worst part is, I viewed God the same way. No matter how many how many sermons on grace and God's unconditional love and all that I heard over the years, and fully believed, I was conditioned to believe in being loved without believing that I would actually receive that love. Enter this summer, three amazing friends, and God's incredible moving. 

This summer is the first one I haven't spent working at camp since I started college. Instead I'm renting a room in my dorms and working at the church which shares our campus. I don't have that many hours of work a week, so a lot of my time is spent with two of my best friends from school, who live nearby, and a brand new friend introduced to me through one of them. This is going to be kind of hard to do without names, haha, so let's call them friend 1, 2, and 3. Now, friend 1 has the gift of discernment, and friend 3 has had a lot of cruddy stuff going on in her life lately, so friend 1 decided to get all of us together and work on bearing one another's burdens. This turned into an all-nighter, running from 11pm to 6:30am, and although we started off with addressing friend 3's burdens, we went through everyone's stuff eventually. While friend 3 was sharing, little things she said kept sounding familiar and dredging up issues that I had kept buried for a long time. Now, both 1 and 2 have known me for three years, and they know me better than I know myself. Literally. Especially friend 2 - he can just look at me and tell me exactly what I am thinking or dealing with at that exact moment. Crazy sauce. Anyway, because of this, they could tell that something was bugging me and I needed to share. So after we bore friend 3's burdens with her, they immediately turned on me and forced me to talk - which I hated, haha, but definitely needed! I shared what I wrote in the previous paragraph, plus some other stuff, and they set right to work throwing Scripture at me and asking me questions and revealing to me little by little how much of a lie I have believed about myself and my relationships with others. Some of it I had heard before, a lot of it was old concepts said in new ways that suddenly clicked. The most important thing I learned all night, something that completely blew my mind and changed my viewpoint, was something that friend 2 impressed upon me when he vehemently urged, "Don't let anyone define the way that I care about you. Never let anyone else define the way that I love you." He hates being compared to other people, and he showed me how, without realizing it, I automatically associate everyone who enters my life with my mother. For years I have believed that everyone who loves me will treat me the same way she did, that they will be less loving to me if I screw up, or may ditch me entirely if I don't live up to their standards. Totally led by God, friend 2 showed me how absolutely ridiculous that is - he is not my mother, he has not been through the things that made her the way she is, he does not see people the way she does, and he will never react in the way she does. And the same goes for everyone else. That concept completely broke me! Because the exact same goes for God. He is GOD, and He has His own identity, His own way of doing things - and He will never reject or avoid or accuse me. (For there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. ~Romans 8:1) This means that I don't have to wait for the other shoe to drop - both shoes are on the ground already. Or they're in the air, but won't ever fall... or they're on His feet... I dunno. You get the metaphorical point. :P 

Guess what? Same goes for you! If you have a hard time trusting in God because people have let you down in the past, stop it. If you believe that God's love is conditional because people have stopped loving you, knock it off. He is not them. He is trustworthy, and faithful, and He does not have a hidden agenda with dark purposes. He really, truly, wholly, perfectly does LOVE us. Go read Romans. Go read Ephesians (especially 2:11-22). Go read Zephaniah 3:17 (my favorite verse)! Go read the whole Bible, for cryin' out loud, haha! The whole thing is a love letter to us. His children. His beloved. His sons and daughters. His bride. 

And then go watch this video. Because YOU. ARE. LOVED. (And I'm fairly certain that Jesus sounds a lot like Josh Groban... except better, of course.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-G8IfjPAII