Acceptance.

“[Agape love] is a profound concern for the welfare of another without any desire to control that other, be thanked by that other, or enjoy the process.” — Edward Nason West

Two months ago my man and I heard Anne Lamott speak. Every word transfixed me, but one story in particular adhered to my brain. An Alaskan couple, friends of Anne’s, desperately wanted children. By the time they reached their tenth wedding anniversary, they’d tried fertility drugs, IVF, old wives’ tales, and mountains of prayer, all to no avail. Finally, they started the adoption process. With the pressure gone, as sometimes happens, the couple conceived. Joyfully they trekked to the city for numerous appointments due to the wife’s advanced maternal age. Unfortunately, the doctor soon had painful news: the baby was a hermaphrodite. Anne’s friends had three choices: 1) surgically remove the female organs, 2) surgically remove the male organs, or 3) raise the baby as a hermaphrodite. They spent the rest of the nine months in prayer and serious discussion with counselors, medical professionals, pastors, and each other. After the birth, the mother wrote on her blog, “We decided to love the baby that came.”

What a liberating decision. The baby that came to my mother 28 years ago is in turn compassionate and prideful, intelligent and ignorant, wise and foolish, devout and sinful, creative and dull. She has too-large thighs and crooked ring fingers. She’s an avid reader but a terrible athlete. She burns the rolls and still forgets to turn off the oven. But my parents love the baby that came. So do my man, my sister, my friends, my Savior. It’s downright incomprehensible when I think about it—being loved in this way—because I certainly don’t deserve it.

Not that anyone ever does. Last week in French III, I asked my students an unfair and impossible question: Define “love”. A beautiful discussion resulted, but my favorite answer was this one: “Love grows when the space between people is filled with acceptance.” How beautiful. In my experience, we’re all messy, and, screw-ups that we are, we don’t deserve anything, least of all acceptance. But we’re trying our best, however successful or faulty our attempts may be. We’re trying to find community, to breathe in peace, to be a little less lonely. We’re all hoping that someone will accept the—by all accounts, problematic—baby that came. So we accept each other as perfect and imperfect as we paradoxically are, stumbling toward something like love.

I’ll take it.

Stories.

Everyone knows not to pray for patience. Let me tell you what else not to pray for: a story. One icy Colorado afternoon a few Decembers ago, my former sister-in-law, who is a reading teacher, and I were talking about stories as we drove to the city. She and her husband have the most beautiful love story, and I asked her why she thought she’d been blessed with it. She shrugged and said, “I guess because I asked.” Later that night, I prayed a prayer that might have changed the course of everything, if you believe in that sort of thing. I asked God for a story. I asked him for adventure, to be involved in something bigger than I am. I asked him to show his glory through my life. I asked for indisputable miracles.

As all the best writers have proven, if you’re going to set up a miraculous event, you need a seemingly insurmountable conflict. You need something way too big for humans to fix in order to validate a deus ex machina. Well, if you’ve read my sex blog, you know a source of deep pain in my erstwhile marriage. I’ve written about other losses and sadnesses, too; others I’ve kept private. And now I feel like I’m in that part that all the best stories have where you think, “How in the world will this turn out?” But light is pushing through the cracks, just waiting for the moment God turns it loose and crumbles the pain with a season of joy. For instance, my man’s spectacular daughter let me take care of her on Saturday while she was ill, and his son gave me a precious nickname. Light. Last week God sent me the same message from four people who don’t know each other—two of whom don’t even know me well—in a way I couldn’t question. Light. A student gave me a huge and by all accounts undeserved compliment today. Light. More light is coming. God is teaching me joy.

I’ve learned that the best thing about asking God for a story is that when he gives it to you, you never really have the luxury of heading back in your own direction. You can fling open the door and storm off in a huff, but then he chases you with this crazy, powerful love unlike anything you’ve ever dared to imagine, this grace-full love that is exactly the stuff you were hurting for…and you fall into his arms again. You can’t doubt the veracity of the miracle when you are the miracle, when your whole story is the miracle. The joy and freedom are too real.

I don’t have anything in my story, miraculous or otherwise, figured out except that there is Jesus. Because when I am weak, then I am strong. Someone has to be behind that. Someone has to be writing that, and doing a better job than I could. Someone has to be authoring these struggles, conflicts, and “imperfections” to bring a level of artistry and depth to my character that wouldn’t otherwise be there. Every time I reach a moment of pain or conflict in my story, whether I caused it or it waylaid me, I see more of him and more of me. He develops the character of Amie by adding layer after layer of healing. I wouldn’t give that back for anything.

One of my favorite quotes is something I read on a coffee mug—that I totally should have bought—in Barnes and Noble once: “Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” I find that biblical: the endgame of my brokenhearted moments will be beauty for ashes. He’s promised me, and all of us, that. And that’s all the resolution my story needs.

Ears.

I have this thing with names. I’ve written about it once already. The thought of giving a blessing or honoring someone or telling a story with your baby’s name is such a precious concept to me. Many names are on my Love-It List, but as long as I can remember, my favorite name of all has been Kate. Growing up, my most beautiful Barbie was Kate. My favorite paper doll—yes, I played with paper dolls—was Kate. Just last year, I asked on FaceBook what my pen-last-name should be if my pen-first-name was Kate. It’s the perfect name—simple, elegant, and timeless.

So when I got pregnant in July 2008, I was beside myself with excitement. I kept thinking, Kate’s here! She didn’t stay long enough for me to know by way of scientific confirmation that she was a girl, but I know anyway because moms just know. When I daydreamed about what the rest of her name could be, a Buechner quote kept resurfacing: “Grace is something you can never get but only be given. There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries…or bring about your own birth.” Having for years worn that definition of grace like a pair of contact lenses, I knew my daughter could have no other name. She was something I could never deserve, something only God could give me. My then-husband let me take the reins with naming, so I chose Anna Catherine. Anna means “grace,” and Catherine means “pure,” so my baby girl would be named “pure grace.” Which is exactly what she was. But she’d go by “Kate,” of course.

Unfortunately, Kate faded from me on Sunday, 14 September. I cried steady, silent tears, sitting with my back against the tub. I was a heartbroken mother whose daughter had been taken in the night. I hadn’t protected her, hadn’t known how. I did the only thing I could: I crawled back into bed and prayed. At first, I heard nothing, but the tender presence of the Holy Spirit comforted my heart. Then I had a powerful, inexplicable urge to look up Isaiah 49:16, a verse I did not already know. Bewildered, I opened my Bible and read: “See, I have written your name on the palms of my hands…” My name. Kate’s name. The tears came again, but this time for an entirely different reason. The verse reminded me that I am so precious to God that when he looks down at his hands—or, perhaps, Jesus’s—he sees my name. And in a small way, I had the same thing going with my Kate. The veins in my right wrist, I had noticed as a child, form an unmistakable K. After that night, it became a sweet reminder. Kate was gone, but her name was written on my palm, so to speak, and God makes all things new. God restores.

Over time, he has restored my heart. Time, I believe, numbs pain, helps a wound scar over maybe, but God actually heals. Certainly, sadness hits me unexpectedly sometimes, or with unexpected force: it was the saddest and most unfair day of my life, being at once Mother and Not-mother. But God has guided me through the process of letting my daughter stay with him, of not begrudging the laws of nature that sent her his way. For too long, I carried her as a millstone around my neck. I feared that not thinking about her might mean she never existed. As her mother, it seemed to fall on my shoulders to acknowledge her fleeting presence. But God has taken my heart from that prison of grief into a position of grace. I do think about her occasionally, but in a peaceful, heavenly way. I imagine her spinning giddily in a white cotton dress in a field of lavender, so drunk with joy she dissolves into giggles. I imagine her sitting on Jesus’s lap, enamored with him, asking him questions with the ethereal wisdom that a heaven-born child must possess. I imagine her smiling when she sees me, if you do that sort of thing in heaven.

And tonight, when it was time for a little earth-born girl to fall asleep, she wriggled onto the couch next to me and settled into my arms. She looked into my eyes with a beautiful face lit by a grin and laced her fingers with mine. She and I do not share DNA. I do not have memories of her in the womb. She does not belong to me in the way she belongs to her mother. But she loves me, and I love her, and we both love her father more than we could tell you. She and her brother have become a part of my heart, and as I look forward to many years with the man I love, I feel doubly blessed to be their friend as well. I never knew life could be this good, this full. But when God restores life and fulfills promises, he doesn’t do a halfhearted job of it. Speaking of promises, those letters the veins in my wrists so clearly form happen to be their initials—hers and her brother’s. As someone who does not believe in coincidence, only divine winks, you can imagine how this hits me. Especially since her name is “pure grace,” too. And she goes by Kate.

If you ever wondered whether God hears you cry out, whether he knows who you are…he does.

Redemption.

My pastor says it’s pointless to judge people because 1) People have reasons—which you don’t know—for doing what they do, 2) You have plenty of your own crap to deal with, and 3) No one cares about your judgments anyway. I’ll be honest with you: judging others was something I struggled with for years because I was pretty sure I knew better than most people what they ought to be doing. It’s like Claire, the mom from Modern Family, said: “I know I can’t run [my daughter’s] life for her, but if she would let me, I’d be so good at it!” Into my early twenties, I had a judgment for everything, partly because being a Christian made me feel superior wisdom-wise, partly because I was raised to have confidence in myself, and partly because I am human.

Last Friday would’ve been my fifth wedding anniversary, which is why these thoughts are bubbling in my brain. When some people heard of my separation and divorce, they became rigidly judgmental. Some wanted me to know that divorce is a sin. Others wanted me to know that it’s fine if my heart was so hardened I had to divorce, but that I could never remarry because that would be a sin. Once I was told that divorce isn’t actually possible for a Christian. Someone else said that since we are attracted to the same type of person repeatedly, divorcing my first husband would only lead to divorcing second, third, and subsequent husbands. All I can say is thank God for my church and the grace I found in it. The leader of my Divorce Care group, a woman I deeply respect and love, was the first person to hold my hand and tell me she understood. As much as I appreciated the prayers and encouraging words of my friends and family, and I really did, the gift of being looked in the eye, understood, and shown grace was something that reached my soul.

It seems to me that to create the grand mosaic of grace, God needs those of us who have been divorced, gone bankrupt, been addicted, lost children, lost faith, lost dignity, and whatever else. He needs the women who got pregnant before they got married and the men (and women) who found someone else after they got married. He needs the drug dealers and porn stars and lawbreakers. He needs the ones who were bitter, lustful, abusive, greedy, arrogant, disrespectful, unloving. He needs the brokenhearted, mistreated, ignored, and forgotten. He needs people who can, like my Divorce Care leader, look his babies in the eye and say, “I get it. I know that story,” and comfort them in a way that mirrors his comforting of us. One of my favorite traits of my Divorce Care leader is that she is 100% shockproof. There is nothing you can say to this woman that raises her eyebrows in disgust or horror. You can tell her the worst things you’ve said and done, and she says things like, “Yeah, we tend to do that, don’t we?” The grace she has shown me, and so many others, is the very face of God. You can’t tell me God doesn’t use her story—the good, the bad, and the ugly—to reach his children.

I no longer assign blame for my divorce; it doesn’t matter. Anne Lamott says, “There are three things you can’t change: the past, the truth, and other people.” Divorce is a part of my past, and that’s that. Did I miss the will of God? Don’t know, don’t care; it's not something I can go back and change. (Although I do not at all regret my first marriage.) This is what I do know and care about: nothing I have ever done, including divorce, has caused God not to love me anymore. Nothing I have ever done has changed God’s promise of protection, healing, and grace in my life. Nothing I have ever done has made God scrap his plans for me and leave me to figure it out alone. I made mistakes in my marriage, and I live with the knowledge of having caused my ex-husband pain. But I do not have to live with guilt or shame, nor do I have to listen to other's judgments about my life. My story isn't about them or even me. It's about Jesus. I am saved. I am a part of God’s plan for humanity. And he makes all things new. New.

Prince Charming.

I want to try this love thing again. So far, romantic love in my life has left something to be desired. Get this: I’ve been engaged three times. (I’ve been proposed to four times, but I showed a little restraint once and said no.) And we all know how I was married that one time for almost five years. Romance is the bane of my existence. But for some unknown reason, I still believe in it. I am still willing to throw myself out there if I find a trustworthy, interested (and interesting) man. But some things will be different. I’m not looking for the same kind of man that I was five years ago when I got married. Or seven years ago when I was in the second engagement. Or nine years ago when I was in the first. Those men, all good men, just didn’t work out. I was looking for the wrong kind of thing.

I want someone whose heart has been broken so he knows how important it is to take precious care of love. I want someone who is nerdy about something, such that when he talks about it passion flushes his face. I want someone who has sinned, really screwed something up, so he lavishly gives and appreciates grace and mercy. I want someone imperfect but honest. I want someone who will happily live a lilting, peculiarly harmonious life with me, ready to heed God’s direction for us at any moment. Preferably, he’s not rich, powerful, or disarmingly handsome—I don’t trust those types. My Prince Charming may in fact not be charming at all, just someone who has experienced enough life to know that all we really have on this planet is God and the people who love us.

If God grants me the desires of my heart, which the Bible promises to those who seek him, then I have to believe that somewhere out there is a man who will be my friend and will profoundly love me, too. He will hold my hand when I’m scared and offer his coat when I’m cold. He’ll even overlook my tendency to overcook the eggs. I will look at him with awe and respect and tell everyone how blessed I am that he chose me. We’ll laugh at ourselves, we’ll eat chicken for dinner, we’ll take the dog to the park. We’ll make each other mad, and we’ll get over it. We’ll wonder how we’re going to make it, and we’ll get over it. We’ll stress over things that God will work out, and then we’ll marvel at His grace and provision. We’ll enjoy thousands of nothing-special days together. We will not be perfect. But we will do something extraordinary together: life.

Losing it.

I needed two pairs of shoes—brown sandals and white sandals—so I went to the discount shoe shop in town last Friday. While admiring our feet in the mirror, another customer and I started discussing weight loss. She’d lost 35 pounds and was back to her pre-three-children weight. I told her I’d lost 70 pounds and was smaller than I’d been in high school. We started swapping tips, and since so many people have asked me how I lost my weight, I thought I’d post my eleven most helpful ones here. I’m no guru, but these have worked for me.

1.              Participating in exercise classes. You will inevitably work harder than you would’ve on your own because of the pumping music, trained instructor, and camaraderie of the environment. I found that I especially love Zumba; I’d go even if I weren’t trying to lose weight. If there’s no class, I try to make a workout date with my friend M. That way, I’m less likely to back out or quit early. Plus, we can chat while we treadmill it up. And M is even more motivating than my iPod because we hold each other accountable to the same plan—the same increases and decreases in speed and grade at the same intervals.

2.              Investing in music. On days that I can’t get to the gym, I’m much likelier to take a walk or go for a jog if I have music I want to listen to. Plus, I have some playlists set up that push me hard and then let me rest for a few strides, so the tempo of the songs forces me to do interval training without me really having to think about it when I’m on the track.

3.              Brushing my teeth. My kryptonite is desserts and sodas. I’ve learned, however, that if I brush my teeth when a sweet craving hits, I won’t hit the Oreo cabinet. If I did, they wouldn’t taste right. The sodas, however…I’ll let you know when I get that habit kicked. Which might never happen. Sweet Moses, I love soda.

4.              Buying flavored coffee. I am at a slight advantage in the coffee department because 1) I don’t like coffee drinks, like cappuccinos and sweet lattes, and 2) I don’t take sugar in my coffee. So specialty coffees are a workable substitute for dessert: they’re calorie-free (except for my nondairy creamer), and they have the flavor twist of chocolate-raspberry truffle, vanilla biscotti, cinnamon hazelnut, and so on. Delicious and cozy.

5.              Following Weight Watchers. I love this plan. It helps me with portion control, doesn’t force me to eat anything I don’t want, and is 100% customizable to my preferences and needs. I never feel deprived or hungry or stuffed to the brim with vegetables.

6.              Cutting myself some slack. I started losing weight in August 2010. I lost 70 pounds in one year. Last September, life became really tough, and I simply couldn’t focus on weight loss. So I took five months off. I exercised some, watched what I ate some, and maintained my new weight within five to ten pounds. In March some of my stress cleared, so I refocused on weight loss. I’m nearly at my August 2011 weight again, and I have no reason to stop there. Instead of berating myself for the weight-loss vacation, I’m proud that I was able to keep from gaining much. That is unlike the old Amie. But I have learned to cut myself slack in other ways. For example, if I’m in an exercise class that causes me to work so hard I get nauseated, then I slow down. I don’t get frustrated or embarrassed. If I need a weight-loss free day, I take one. The journey through the last 30 pounds might take longer than I’d like, but that’s okay. The harder I work to get it off, the less likely I will be to put it back on.

7.              Buying higher heels and smaller-sized clothes that I love. After a 70-pound loss, I discovered how sexy I feel in high heels. So now I own a few that I acquired over several months from the discount shoe store. I feel confident when I look in the mirror and see the sculpted calves and lifted derrière that the heels bring out. And little is more motivating than getting a clearance-rack top at Kohl’s for $5 that makes me feel skinny. Buying a cheap something that’s one size down and then fitting into it in a few weeks breeds success quickly.

8.              Reading Women, Food, and God by Geneen Roth. It’s impossible to laud this book enough. Roth is spot-on when it comes to explaining the mental processes and frustrations of chronic dieting. I literally sat amazed, devouring some of the chapters at lightning speed and thinking, How does she know stuff I’ve never let out of my brain?! I highly recommend the book for anyone who’s frustrated with his/her eating habits, particularly if your habits include obsessive dieting or (like mine) emotional eating. NOTE: The book has almost nothing to do with God, and its revelations are certainly not gynocentric in nature.

9.              Finding light but delicious versions of my favorite foods. Hungry Girl (http://www.hungry-girl.com) is an excellent resource for stuff like this. My roommate and I absolutely love her low-cal brownies, and they’re so simple to make. Open a can of pumpkin, pour the whole thing into a package of devil’s food cake mix, stir, and scoop into muffin cups. Bake at 350^o for however long the package suggests, and you end up with luxurious, velvety chocolate cupcakes. They honest-to-God do not taste a bit like low-cal brownies. Finding recipes like this keeps lighter food interesting; I don’t have to eat cottage cheese and celery all day long. I still eat foods I enjoy and just watch how much I consume.

10.           Keeping the goal in mind. I’m losing weight for reasons more important than my appearance. Diabetes runs in my mom’s side of the family. The diminished fertility brought on by PCOS is compounded by obesity. Those two health factors are much more on my mind than appearance…although certainly that is important to me, too. When I’m stressed and I want to eat a whole cake, I try to remember not to sacrifice what I really want for what I want in the moment.

11.           Praying. By far my #1 weapon, but it doesn’t sound like much of a tactic, does it? Here’s the thing. Just like I want to be healthy and take care of myself, God wants that for me, too. He wants me to live abundantly, to present myself to him as a living sacrifice, to take care of the body he gave me. So I pray and ask for help. I ask him to help me resist actions that detract from my goals. I ask him to fortify me with his Spirit and satisfy my heart so that emotional eating loses its appeal. With my God I can scale any wall and crush an army (Psalm 18:29); why would alimentary desires be any different?

I still have 30 pounds to go, but that is so doable. It’s nothing like the 100 I started out needing to lose. My goal is to be down two more sizes by the fall and at my goal weight by next January. I could meet those goals even if I lost less than a half pound per week. It’s the home stretch, y’all!

Adultery and Murder.

Certain words in the Christian “language” have always bothered me because I felt I should use them, but had no concrete idea of what they meant. “Redemption” is an example. My mind had always roughly equated it with “salvation,” and I didn’t understand the need for both a Savior and a Redeemer. A few weeks ago I started digging around in Scripture to see what else besides salvation might be under the jurisdiction of a “redeemer.”

As it turns out, there once lived a handsome, heroic king who was everybody’s favorite. He was a warrior, a poet, and a musician—a Renaissance man to be sure. Having been anointed by God at a young age and close to God all his life, he was richly blessed with peerless military prowess, a number of gorgeous wives, endless cash flow, and the unshakeable protection of God. One day, after receiving news of another blowout victory, he sauntered up on the roof and looked with pride over his kingdom. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a woman more beautiful than his imagination could have produced. He turned to gaze on her more directly as she rinsed her hair. The water caught the sunlight, illumining her perfect figure with an amber glow. His body ached with desire, and, afraid to move, he whispered to his servant, “Who is this woman?” The latter followed the path of his vision and responded, “Oh, that’s Bathsheba, Uriah’s wife.” The name sounded magnificent as David turned it over on his tongue. Bathsheba. He knew it was fate and sent the servant to bring her to him.

It was every man’s dream followed by every man’s nightmare. The two spent a passionate evening together before David said, “You better get home.” Bathsheba regretfully acquiesced, and the two parted with wistful half-smiles and several lingering good-bye kisses. She was the subject of many a daydream of David’s, and he thought often and fondly of his one-time lover. But eight weeks or so later, his fleeting thoughts of the bathing beauty were halted: David was delivered an unsigned message that simply read, “I’m pregnant.” His heart thudded against his ribcage and he lie back on the bed, trying to figure out the best way to deal with his unwelcome surprise. Finally, he called for his servant and ordered, “Get Uriah out here.”

Uriah was a really good man, serious about both work and ethics. To begin their conversation, David praised this quality and then constructed the pretense of asking for battle news. Uriah gave him a quick rundown and David said, “You’ve obviously had a difficult stint out there; why don’t you go home to your wife and relax.” They shook hands and in no time, Uriah was on his way. But he didn’t go home. He slept outside the city walls with the guards since he knew his fellow soldiers were doing the same. David saw him the next morning and asked suspiciously, “I told you to go home. Why didn’t you?” Uriah explained his commitment to his men, and while David appreciated the sentiment, it was imperative that Uriah sleep with his wife as soon as possible. This went on for a few nights until David realized there was just no convincing Uriah to go home and enjoy his wife’s delightfully perfumed embrace. So he switched to Plan B and wrote a letter to the commander. He ordered the commander to put Uriah on the frontlines where he would most certainly be killed, forever ignorant of the news of the king’s bastard child.

The commander did not make a habit of questioning the king, so Uriah was predictably killed in battle. The commander sent word back to David that the enemy had surged in forcefully, and Uriah was among those who died. Bathsheba appropriately went into mourning, but as soon as her time was served, David sent for her and married her (II Samuel 11).

In the space of one story, David broke half the Commandments: he coveted, committed adultery, lied, murdered, and stole, all because one afternoon he noticed a beautiful woman. But instead of ousting David and cutting his psalms out of the Bible, God used the once-sinful union of David and Bathsheba to bring Solomon into the world, a man whose renowned wisdom in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes still astounds. Furthermore, God used David and Bathsheba and “the child of their child of their child a thousand years thence,”* to bring about the birth of his own Son. So the lineage of Jesus—of Jesus—includes a gigantic, five-Commandment-breaking sin, a skeleton in the closet if there ever was one. But God’s love covered the whole thing and restored it to perfection, just like Romans 8:28 promises (“God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them,” NLT.). To me, redemption is something like that.

*part of a quote from Frederick Buechner’s Beyond Words

Ducks (or Chickens).

When I was a little girl, I had this fuzzy sleeping gown covered with either ducks or chickens. I can see it in my mind’s eye as I write, but my mental vision has gone a little blurry, like Christmas lights through unfocused eyes. My bed was a heavy, antique wooden structure with four curvy posts and a lacy comforter. Every night as I scooted under the covers, my parents read to me from my graphic-novel Bible, and my dad, positioned at the foot of my bed, sang “Jesus Loves Me” with his hands protectively resting on my little, crossed ankles. I grew up knowing I had a Guardian out there somewhere who looked on me with kindness and affection—my square one as I learned about Jesus’s love. I started with “the Bible tells me so” because in my cute poultry sleeping gown, I didn’t yet know the love of Jesus. I knew how to obey my parents, sing choruses, and retell Bible stories ad nauseum, but as Jesus says in Matthew, “Whoever has been forgiven little shows only a little love” (Luke 7:47b, NIV).

Then I grew up. And as we usually do when we grow up, I started making mistakes. I lost sight of the sweetness of a relationship with Jesus. I spiritually expressed my adulthood and independence by employing what Daniel Henderson calls “Christian autopilot.” Rather than talking to God and ardently seeking his face, I checked in when things felt difficult but otherwise lived a mostly clean life on my own, going to church on Sundays and name-dropping “God” whenever appropriate. I was devoutly serious about my faith, but not necessarily about my relationship with Jesus (although for a long time I convinced myself that those were synonymous). That worked just fine until the broken dreams and failure of an ended marriage hit me face-on. I might as well have been back in my sleeping gown on the floor of my pink bedroom for all the smallness I felt. But let me tell you a little bit about the love of my Jesus.

When you mess up everything in your life so profoundly that you have trouble keeping your eyes dry, Jesus doesn’t leave. Even if you’re somewhat—or completely—to blame. Even if you spend months resisting Him. Even if you do what He directly asks you not to do. He still doesn’t leave. He has seen what you do, but he heals you anyway (Isaiah 57:18). He leads you along…with kindness and love and stoops down tenderly to care for you (Hosea 11:4). He sends out His word to you and heals you (Psalm 107:20). He forgives all the smut that originated with or in you (Luke 7:48 and throughout the Gospels). In love and mercy, He redeems you (Isaiah 63:9). He erases your sins…and never thinks of them again (Isaiah 43:25). He restores your joy (Psalm 51:8, 12). He looks down at His palms where He has written your name (Isaiah 49:16).

Who does that? Who else not only listens but actually longs to listen to you for as long as you’re willing to talk? Who else floods your life with so much grace you practically drown in it? Who else speaks so deeply to your heart that you feel His words? Who else heals, not just mends, your broken heart? Who else keeps track of every tear that falls (Psalm 56:8)? Who else forgives you before you ask? Who else sees your heart in its entirety and loves you regardless? Who else wants to hear the banal details of your day, even though He was there, just so He can see them through your eyes? Who does that but Jesus?


The most rewarding relationships I enjoy—and all of the best people in the world happen to be in my life—are all to a certain point limited because they are human, but that is not so with Jesus. Jesus’s love extends beyond human capability, beyond human reason, to remind me every minute of every day that I am just as precious to Him—my broken, inexplicable, sinful self is just as precious to Him—as the little girl in the ducks-or-chickens sleeping gown is to her parents. And infinitely, infinitely more. Infinitely more. Because nothing—not death, life, angels, demons, fears, worries, present things, future things, my own darkness, or darkness stretching toward me from hell—nothing can ever, ever separate me from the love of my treasured Redeemer (Romans 8:38, 39). Who else loves like that but Jesus?