Author Archives: Ruth Barron

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I have always liked the movie Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.  The story starts with the main character, Adam, looking for a wife.  He wants a wife who is "young and strong and had a lot of work in her."  He wants her to be beautiful.  Other than that, in his mind, one woman is pretty much like another.  Of course, by the end of the movie, his heart changes.

This Adam was definitely made in the image of God as I saw Him.  I could say God loved me, but the only supporting evidence I knew for that was that He had died for me.   However, what I perceived was that God wanted me for my work, for what I had to give.  Of course, I didn't think God was selfish.  He didn't want me to give for His own sake; He wanted me to give for the sake of the world.

The first reason I had for believing this is sheer need.  People are in deep need.  There are the lost, those who haven't heard and believed in God.  There are the poor.  There are those who don't have water and food.  There are the orphans and the widows.  I saw an immense amount of need, so I perceived God as a Father who is never satisfied.  Again, I didn't think this was wrong of God, though my heart did.  I felt that the need was so great and urgent that even when I give, it is never enough, and I should give more.

I was very tired.  I didn't spend money on myself.  I didn't rest.  I labored for the Lord.  I kept giving and giving and giving to God.  My prayer list grew longer and longer.  I didn't read just for fun.  Instead I read devotional books.  I rarely watched movies.  I fasted.  I was both proud of everything I had given up for God and jealous of others because they had the things for which I couldn't stop longing.  I remember being so hungry (not physically hungry, but longing hungry) that I prayed desperately, "Please, God, I just want something nice.  Please give me something nice."  Almost immediately, a friend called.  That was about the only nice thing I thought pleased God.

God began to untangle this.  First, He made me buy china.  I had been looking at the china online for four years.  I was proud of my sacrificing the china for God.  I had given it up for the kingdom.   But somehow, I began to feel that God wanted me to buy the china.  I argued with Him, then I understood God to say, "You can't give to me anymore if you won't let me give to you."  We (my husband and I) bought the china.  It is beautiful, and it has helped me to see God's love for me.

God also told me I needed to learn to feast, to rejoice.  Then He asked me whether my self-restrictions were working to remove desire.  I had to admit they weren't.  I still longed for the things I was denying myself.  He told me, "I did not put desires in your heart in order for you to prove how much you love me by sacrificing them.  I put desires in your heart so that I can delight you.  I delight to delight you."

This astounded me.  I had thought all the desires of my heart were bad, and my heart deceitfully wicked.  But the God who created us very good created us with a delight in good things, both tangible and intangible.  Just like I love to hear my children giggle as I tickle them, God loves to delight us.  He created us with tickle spots!

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Sibling rivalry.  Sharing.  As soon as child number two is on the way, these are the issues parents begin to ponder.  How will baby number one deal with baby number two?  Mom and Dad work hard to make sure both children feel loved, to make sure baby number one doesn't feel pushed aside by baby number two.  Then comes baby number three, four, five.  Each family with a different number.

Two children is fairly simple in theory.  One for each side of mom when reading a story.  One for each parent when on an outing.  After two, things are less simple.  You have to be creative at storytime.  Someone drapes along the top of the couch, someone sits on your lap, and you have to peer around a head to read the book.  You change seats in the middle of storytime.  On outings the youngest children hold your hands, the older children walk in front where you can see them.  Family dynamics shift with each new member.  Big families seem overwhelming.  How do they do it?

You also have the issue of sibling friendships.  Who favors whom?  Who plays with whom, and who doesn't get along with whom?  The dynamics can shift from day to day, but they can also be fairly consistent.  My husband and I enjoy watching the interplay of siblings as the context shifts.

Peter and Andrew and John and James loved their big brother Jesus.  They wanted to be his favorites.   Say you love me best.  Say I can sit next to you in Heaven.  Of course, Jesus gets to sit next to God in Heaven, so he really only has one side left, but the two sets of brothers are thinking of Jesus' two sides and wanting those seats for themselves.  They quarrel over this issue frequently.  And as frequently, Jesus reprimands them.

I, being a younger sibling, got to watch this from afar, from Scripture reading.  And I learned from it.  Don't want to be close to God.  That is selfish.  Be happy to be far away from Him.  Be happy because at least you are part of the family.  So you're not someone special!   If you were close to God, someone else would have to be far away.  Know your place.  It's to be nothing special, but at least you're still family.

It wasn't just the disciples with Jesus.  I saw it in the Israelites.  Judah gets to be near the temple.  Reuben and the others across the Jordan chose to be far away, so maybe that's okay.  But what about the others, like Ephraim?  And the new Israel prophesied seemed worse.  It's not going to be a patchwork anymore.  It's going to be nice and equitable, except for proximity to Jerusalem and the temple.  Two are close.  The rest get farther and farther away.  I saw the priests with their special closeness to God, then the Levites, then the rest of the Israelites, then us.

To be honest with you, I wanted to be close to God.  I was selfish.  I felt resentful of my place of distance from Him.  But, desiring to be good, I wrestled with those feelings.  I tried to reason with myself and get rid of my selfish feelings.  For years, I wrestled.  But it didn't work.  I still felt resentful, and I still wished I could be one of the ones close to God.

One day, three years ago, as I was sitting on my bed wrestling again with my selfishness, God leaned over me, and with a smile, He whispered something in my ear, "I am not two-sided."  I knew instantly what He meant.  He has a side just for me.  I am one of those chosen to be close to Him.  I remembered Paul saying that God's wisdom is many sided, like a diamond, and I understood.

I understood something else.  I understood that I might be wrong in my definitions of right and wrong.  I heard God again, "If you are trying to remove something from your heart, and it won't move, it may just be because I put it there.  You can't remove what I put in your heart."  I needed to reconsider my definitions of righteousness.  I needed to ask God for His definition.  There might be other areas where I am wrong.  That is surprisingly very freeing.

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We often think of ourselves as God's adopted children.  This got me all tangled up.  In my heart, I believed that Jesus Christ, God's only begotten son and our adoptive brother, was Daddy's favorite.  He deserves to be.  He is truly that good, but I felt very insecure as a second-class sibling.  I believed I belonged biologically to the Father of lies, but that God was willing to adopt me into His family when I agreed to reject my biological family and its ways.  I became part of God's family, but I was always fearful, because I wasn't doing a good job of giving up my old ways.  I remembered what Paul said about the natural branches versus the grafted branches.  Was I going to find myself rejected by my adoptive Father because I didn't really fit the family?

When I was in high school, my family was friends with another family.  This other family was a blended family, with biological, adoptive, and long term foster children.  The biological daughter was sweet and obliging and cheerful and, well, spoiled.  She was Daddy's girl, and she knew it.  The adoptive daughter had been a juvenile delinquent, she seemed secure in herself alone, rather tough.  The foster children had been abused.  They were very shy and fearful.

That family haunted me for years.  While I have seen some good examples of adoption, this was not.  I saw how the parents treated the children, and it wasn't the same.  The parents were very strict with the adoptive and foster children.  They seemed to have good reason.  The children hadn't been taught good behavior.  They had a habit of lying if it might keep them out of trouble.  One daughter had a history of theft.  The parents wanted to teach righteousness, and they felt that strictness was the way to teach it, but that didn't explain why the children were treated differently with regards grades.  Why would they be so gracious to the one when her grades were low and so stern with the others when their grades were middling?  It wasn't ability.  It was something else.  She had favor with her family.

One day three years ago, as I was walking down our steep narrow staircase in Narok, Kenya, God brought John 17:23 to my heart.  In His last prayer, Jesus prayed for us to know that God loves us, even as He loves Jesus.  I had never noticed that "even as" before.  Suddenly, I saw that we are not just tacked on at the end, as if God loves His favorite, Jesus, and He loves us too with a secondary kind of love.  No, He loves us even as He loves Jesus.  Jesus doesn't get special favorite son privileges that are withheld from us.  We've got all the same privileges.  We're God's beloved children, with whom He is well pleased.

I realized something else about that time.  I am not an adoptive child.  Please understand that I am not saying that adoptive children cannot truly belong to our adoptive families.  My brother and his wife have shown me that.  Their children, both biological and adoptive, declare that they have inherited their traits from their parents.  What I am saying is that adoptive children often carry a deep sense of unbelonging in their hearts, and God doesn't want us to carry that.  I am the biological child of God who was kidnapped out of my true family but who has finally been found.  I am being folded back into the arms of the one who gave me birth.  And my True Father, who knows the abuse I suffered under my kidnapper, is especially tender in all His dealings with me.

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There is a phrase, "There are none so blind as those who will not see." Well, there are none so enslaved as those who think they deserve slavery.  I thought I was only fit to be a slave, so I saw the Gospel message as a list of assignments.  Jesus said, "if you love me you will keep my commands."  I didn't realize that Jesus was telling us to focus on getting to know Him and learning to love Him.  I thought He was focusing on behavior.  I searched Scripture to discern what behaviors God liked and pushed myself to do them: thankfulness, worship, service, evangelism, prayer, Bible reading, meditation, discipline, accountability, compassion, confession, giving, tithing, .... My duties expanded, and the weight of my shackles had me plodding more and more slowly.

I was troubled because I could see that my good actions were not coming from my heart. They were coming from obligation, not love.  Phillis Wheatley, the poet who lived much of her life as a slave, wrote, "In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance."  I could see this longing in my heart, but I tried to tell myself I was already free. My heart knew the truth. I was making myself a slave.

Three years ago, my husband and I were reading The Jesus Storybook Bible with the children.  Wonderful book! In the chapter called "The Singer," Sally Lloyd Jones said that Jesus had come to teach us a song we were made to sing:  "God made us.  He loves us.  He is very pleased with us."  Shortly after we read it, I was talking with one of my daughters.  At five years old, her eyes were already haunted with the failure I felt, and it bothered me.  I remembered the song, and I told my daughter, "God is pleased with you."  She answered in a voice of disbelief, "How can that be true?"  Her voice and words were a knife in my heart, but I struggled to answer her, because I didn't believe that God was pleased with me.

(As a side note, at that time, God gave us another name for that daughter – Anastasia, which means resurrection.  He also gave me a new verse to sing her about His love for her.  It has been wonderful to watch her eyes lose their haunted look as God has been healing me.  As I am healed, I am able to be part of God's healing of my children.)

Since them, God has been pouring the thought of His pleasure into my heart.  I don't know how many times He has breathed those words into my heart.  I do remember clearly the last time I heard them vividly.  It was a few months ago.  I was walking with a friend whom I dearly love and rarely see.  We were taking our children to the park.  It was a beautiful spring day.  Everything was glorious except one thing, my heart would not rejoice.

I tried to make my heart rejoice.  I tried to praise God.  I knew when you are discouraged, you are supposed to find something good and praise God for it, yet here I was surrounded by wonder and glory, and my heart would not let me praise.  The harder I tried to praise God for the wonder I could clearly see around me, the more my heart revolted.  I despaired.  My heart just wouldn't cooperate.  If I couldn't make myself praise God about things which were wonderful, there was no hope.  What would I do in hard times?  I was still failing God.

It was at that moment that I heard clearly, "I am pleased with you."  There was a smile in that voice.  I could hear God's pleasure in His tone, and my pressured heart sank into God's embrace.  It wasn't rebellious anymore.  It was dancing!  I could praise God when it came from my heart, and that was enough!  I didn't have to manufacture praise!  Since then, though my heart still rebels at times, I have found praise flowing from my heart more and more.

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Every great love story has an obstacle which must be overcome.  In my relationship with God, the obstacle has been my sense of obligation and my sense of who I was.  I was the prodigal son, who came home to proclaim myself no longer fit to be a son, but only fit to be a slave.  I accepted the party of welcome, then set about trying to make up for my betrayal of my Father by my servitude.  I became a slave, endeavoring to please my Father.

I was convinced I ought to love God, and yet I thought I was by nature incapable of doing what I ought.  I knew that love acts in certain ways, so I thought I must make myself act in those ways.  I did not understand that love for God would grow naturally.  I did not understand that I was fertile soil in which God had planted His seed of love.  Everything the seed needed to grow was in place.  The seed just required time.

Instead, I thought I was only fit to be a slave.  I held as my mantra the verse, "There is none good, no not one."  When God tried to assure me of His love and to claim me as His Daughter, I basically waved that verse at Him and refused to believe Him.

One day, God told me to go look up that verse.  I went to the computer, opened BibleWorks, and hunted for the verse.  It wasn't in any single translation.  Instead, I found "There is none that doeth good, no not one."  (I am still trying to figure out how I, and my sisters, memorized the verse incorrectly.  Part of me wonders whether God just recently fixed a translation error in all translations, both electronic and printed, by His miraculous power.)

Sometimes, I hear a thought in distinct words, and I know it is God speaking.  Other times, when I am afraid to listen to God because what He is saying is too scarily freeing, too different from everything I have believed, God starts nagging at my thoughts with something that won't go away.  This was one of the times when I was afraid to believe God.  It seemed to good to be true.

The thought that nagged at me is this.  A child gets her father's name as her family name.  The Father's name is my name.  My name is Daughter I Am.  My name is not I Do.  At creation, God declared me very good, and that is who I Am.  Though I may do things that are not good, my name is not I Do, so my essence is unchanged.  I am who I am because I am my Father's Daughter, and He made me very good.

When the rich young ruler came and knelt before Jesus, he called Jesus "good teacher."  Jesus asked him, "Why do you call me good?  No one is good except God alone."  This passage always bothered me.  Isn't Jesus good?  Didn't the ruler get it right here?  Why is Jesus challenging him?  Was Jesus challenging him to recognize Jesus as God?  Lately, I've begun to wonder.  What if Jesus was also challenging him to consider the tightly held belief that only God is good and man is bad?  What if Jesus was challenging him to consider Genesis 1:31, in which God saw all that He had made and declared it very good?

I think God is asking me whether my family name is I Am or I Do.  He is asking me to choose.  I can choose to keep the name given me by the Father of Lies, or I can accept the name bequeathed to me by my true Father.  It seems too scarily beautiful to believe, but my heart longs to believe.

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Two years ago, God spoke to me to correct a third misconception I had about this suitor of mine.  I don't remember where I was.  I don't remember what I was doing.  I don't remember what I was thinking.  I often remember context, but it seems that this was like the pearl of great price.  What I heard God say was so startling in its truth, that my questions stilled as I tried to grasp the greatness of this revelation.

God said to me, "You think I'm a God of rape.  You think I will demand by force what you would give me freely if you loved me."  "'You think I'm a God of rape,'" my thoughts echoed.  "Oh, wow.  'You think I will demand by force what you would give me freely if you loved me.'  Wow.  That is what I think!  That is what rape is, taking by force what love would give freely.  That is what I think God is, a God of rape!"

Still my heart argued.  "But, God, would I do what is right if I weren't pushed and prodded and bribed and punished?  I only thought you were trying to push me to do what was right for my own good.  It felt mean, and I felt resentful, but I thought it was just what you had to do because of my nature.  Are you saying that if I were truly free I would choose to do what was right?  Are you saying that I could love you so much that righteousness would flow from my very nature?  But aren't I bad and sinful?  Can anything good truly come from me?"

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One night in April, four years ago, I stood under a cold, windy Nebraska sky and looked up at the stars.  My husband and I were on furlough from a fairly successful two year term in Kenya.  We were missionaries in residence at Nebraska Christian College.  Our ministry there was also fairly successful.  My husband and I were fasting and praying twice a week.  We had a prayer ministry with the NCC students.  We were committed to "Here I am, God, send me."

That night, I had stood under the stars for over an hour, talking and praying with a student.  It was one of the days when I had been fasting.  Usually, I would have already broken fast, but I was still at work.  After the student left, I stayed outside looking up at the stars, and I asked God, "May I go in and eat some ice cream, or is there more work that you would like me to do?"

I don't know my exact words.  All I know is that I wanted to eat something nice, but I had a question in my heart, "What if God has more He wishes I were willing to do?  I have been working hard, but there is so much more to be done.  If I rest now, will God be disappointed?  Will some task be left undone?  Will God's plans be thwarted all because I stopped and rested?"

As I stood looking up at the beauty of the stars, God answered, "You think I am a hard man who reaps where I didn't sow.  In other words, you think I will demand of you what I haven't already worked in you."  The answer seemed rather odd, almost ill-fitting, but I understood that I was free to go break my fast and enjoy some ice cream, so I did.

At the time, I understood that God was saying, "I will work willingness in you before I call you to do something."  I had already been pondering the verse, "For it is He who works in you to will and to do, according to His good pleasure."  But my questions were still deeply rooted.  "What if God is trying to make me be willing, but I'm too bad?  Is He disappointed in me?  Is He just being patient because He has to be?  Is He sighing and taking a deep breath while restraining His fury?  When will He finally lose patience with me?"

These questions have caused me to ponder God's answer, trying to understand what it means.  But I couldn't find an answer to my questions.  Recently, I started looking at the answer in both its context in the moment I asked and in its Biblical story.  In the Biblical story, a servant believes his master is a hard man who reaps where he doesn't sow, so when his master entrusts him with money, the servant buries the money and doesn't use it to gain interest.  We tend to think of the money as our spiritual gifts and burying the money is our unwillingness and refusal to use the gifts for God's work.  But this didn’t fit my context.  I was using my spiritual gifts.  I was offering to do more work.  I was offering to be the servant who comes in from the fields not to rest, but to wait on the table.

So why is He saying I'm the one burying the money because I think He's a hard man who reaps where He doesn't sow?  Maybe I've been looking at the passage incorrectly.  Maybe this is instead a Mary/Martha passage.  Maybe the goal of the parable is not to get me out there, spending my money, using my gifts, doing more.  Maybe the goal of the parable is to point out that I need to sit at His feet more, rest with Him, get to know Him.  Instead of a slave, who works for Him without ceasing, and who is just breaking even on my profits, He is wanting a child who just climbs onto His lap and gets to know Him as He is.  He wants me to come to Him and let every thought of Him being a hard man be swept away by the strength of His love.  Stop doing, and start being.  "Be still, and know that I am God."  "It is God who works in me to will and to do according to His good pleasure."  What I am willing to do is what God has for me to do, and it is enough.  After all, five loaves and two fish fed five thousand.

Oh, I hope that is what He is saying, because it is beautiful!  So far, each time I have tentatively rested from work when I'm tired and can't work without a sense of burden, God has blessed the rest.  May I grow confident to rest.

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Romance stories often have the other suitor, who vies with the true love for the heart of the woman.  In God's wooing of me, the other suitor has always been a distorted view of God.  One suitor looks at me, and His eyes are full of love.  The other looks at what I do, and his eyes are full of anger, and I am afraid of him.  Yet the love in the eyes of the One is slowly gaining my trust and my love, and overcoming my fear of the other.

Often, when I would pray, I would sense a stern and angry face looking down at me.  No matter how hard I would try to remind myself of God's love and forgiveness, this image would glare down at me.  I thought God was angry with me.  He saw my deeds, and He saw that my bad deeds outweighed my good deeds.  He wanted to punish me, so I cowered before Him.  When I went to pray, I felt as though I were suffocating.

Again, it wasn't that I hadn't heard the truth of God's love.  I knew about it and tried to believe it.  I would quote Scripture to myself and pray it aloud, but doubt gnawed away at me.  I remember once when I was praying, I cried, "I hate you, God, but I know it's not You I hate.  I know it's this image I can't stop seeing.  I know You are love, but I can't stop feeling that you are angry with me, and I hate you.  Please help me to see You and to love You."  I was desperate.  I knew that God is love, and love gives birth to love, not hate.  Therefore, when I feel hate, something must be wrong with my perspective.

That's hard to confess.  I've spent a ridiculous amount of time staring at the screen, remembering how awful that tangle was.  I was tired of fighting my heart to make it behave properly.  I kept remembering all God's promises regarding a renewed heart.  The prayer "unite my heart to fear your name" resonated deeply with me.  I didn't want to keep fighting my own heart.  I praise God for His love.  He is truly greater than our feelings.  He doesn't flinch away from honesty but meets it with love and healing and freedom.

Sometime after that, I was in my kitchen washing dishes.  Our daughter, Hannah Gail, had dropped her china saucer, and it had broken.  My husband had scoured the floor to find the pieces and then had painstakingly puzzled them back together.  My heart ached to know whether a broken heart could be healed.  Suddenly, while I worked on dishes, I saw very clearly an image of a Father bending over His work, fitting the broken pieces together.  I knew that Father was the true suitor.

I remember something that God said to me between the time I told Him I didn't love Him and the time I told Him I hated Him.  It was shortly before we moved to Nairobi.  I was sitting under the girls' queen-sized loft bed, their only play area.  It was a mess, as always, and I was struggling with anger at always having to clean it up.  I was struggling with anger and guilt at being angry.  I was struggling with the feeling that I didn't love them.  I wanted to be a loving, patient Mom, but I felt that I was failing.  I felt that I was supposed to make them behave properly, and I was failing.  I wasn't disciplining them properly.  I wasn't loving them properly.

All I could see was what they were doing and what they were failing to do.  I felt all God could see was what I was doing, and what I was failing to do.  While I was under the loft, I heard God reprimand me gently but firmly, "My name is I Am, not I do."  This has taken a long time for me to understand.  The distorted god, whose name is I do, looks at our deeds, and he is angry, because he always wants more.  Our God, whose name is I Am, looks at us, and He gazes in love because He sees who we are, and He sees we are very good.

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I remember the first time I saw my husband, Joshua.  It was my freshman year of college.  He was a junior.  Joshua reminded me of a squirrel.  He came into a room where I was visiting someone, talked for a few minutes, then darted off.  I doubt he even saw me.  Indifference at first sight!

Later, as I noticed other things about him, I became more certain I didn't want to be associated with him.  Joshua was a weird missionary type.  He would walk around campus barefoot, wrapped in a woven shawl from India.  He was friends with other weird missionary types.  When several of those weird missionary types decided to go to the seminary across the street for graduate school, it confirmed to me that I did not want to attend that seminary.

My Grandma, the one who married the red-headed boy, always told me not to tell God “never.”  He would laugh, and that “never” would happen.  Well, I did end up getting a master's degree at that seminary.  I did become friends with Joshua.  Though I argued with God on the matter, I even ended up marrying him, but that is a long story.

Well, in the same way, I knew that God was not the God of my dreams.  I was a Christian.  I would say that I loved God, because I was trying hard to do so, but the spark just wasn't there. I didn't have any theological problem with this.  God wasn't supposed to be what I wanted.  I had heard about people who create their own God according to what they want.  I didn't want to do that.

Instead, I tried to make myself love the God about whom I heard.  He is the God who loved us so much in the past that He gave His Son to die for us.  He is the God who will love us so much in the future that we will have a wonderful life with Him in Heaven.  At present, it doesn't feel like love, but that is because of our sinfulness.  “No discipline is pleasant at the time,” but it's good for you.  The problem is that we are “at the time,” so His love doesn't feel pleasant.  So, despite my effort to love God, I felt terrified of God.

But two years ago, God asked me a question.  We had just moved to our new house near Nairobi.  I was busy getting settled in.  As I was working on laundry, I heard God ask, “What does your heart long for in a Father?”

I did not know what to say.  How could I answer this question?  He was asking me, who is the God of your dreams?  How could I tell Him that He's not it?  But He asked me.  I couldn't be rude and ignore Him.  I focused on the laundry to give myself time to think.  Then I gathered my courage and told Him, “I want a Father who will lead me to obey Him because I love Him, not drive me to obey Him because I'm afraid of Him.”

Immediately, I heard, “What makes you think I'm not like that?”  I was flabbergasted.  My initial response was, “Because of how you act.”  Still, He cared enough to ask me what I longed for, maybe I should actually think about His second question.  What does make me think He's not this God of my dreams?  Maybe my dreams are true!

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I've always liked the story of how my grandparents met.  My grandma, a teacher from Michigan, receives an advertisement in the mail about UVA's summer school.  UVA is still an all-boys school, but women are allowed in for summer classes.  Grandma isn't sure how she was put on UVA's mailing list, but she is looking for something to do with her summer, so why not?

After Grandma arrives at UVA, she hears a lot about the red-headed boy working in the library.  When she goes to the library, Grandpa, the red-headed boy, is working behind the stacks.  Grandpa sees Grandma.  He asks her to play a match stick game.  Later, he walks her back to her room.  That night, Grandma tells her roommate she's met the man she's going to marry.

Grandpa is finished at UVA, but after meeting Grandma, he stays a day or two longer.  When he leaves, they write to each other.  A year or so later, they begin their 62 years of marriage together.

For some people, it works that way.  You meet, and somehow you know!  For others it is quite different.  When you meet, you are certain this is not the person for you.

Well, I knew that God was not for me.  God loved the church, yes, but He only loved this rather insignificant, very unfit member of the church in a generic kind of way.  It's just kind of habitual for Him, nothing special.  The focus of this general love for me was what I could contribute to the church.  He "loved me" for my work.  He gave me His forgiveness so that I could try again to do all the good things I'd failed to do before.  However if I didn't perform, I'd be cut from the team.  I spent all my energy trying to please Him so I could stay in His favor.

In spite of my best efforts, I knew that if God really investigated me my failures would outweigh my successes.  God's forgiveness had failed in me.  I wasn't good enough.

Please understand, it wasn't that I hadn't been told about God's love for me.  I could quote Scripture and tell myself that my perspective was wrong.  I tried to believe He loved me.  However, no matter how many times I tried to tell myself the truth, my heart still didn't believe it.  I only knew it with the hearing of the ears.  I needed the seeing of the eyes.  I didn't need knowledge about God's love; I needed experience of God's love.

As I looked at my life and my heart one day three years ago, I told my husband, "I am such a failure."  Then while I sat and nursed my fourth-born and saw all the chaos that was my house, I turned to God and said, "I am such a failure."  God did not wait for me to finish those words.  While I was still praying, a thought interrupted me, "I don't see that."

I was very surprised.  I remember looking around and thinking something along the lines of, "Well, duh!  Just look around You.  You can't miss it."  But since I thought saying  something like that to God was a bit dangerous (Would a bolt of lightning strike me?), I asked, "What DO you see?"  I heard a voice of infinite tenderness say, "Daughter!"

Right then, this was more than I could believe.  I thought, "I must be making this up."  I basically covered my spiritual ears and refused to listen to another word.  But my hungry heart heard and clung to the word He had already spoken, "He doesn't see failure !  He sees Daughter !"

My first objection to a love relationship between God and me was wrong.  He was interested in me, not in my work.  He wasn't even looking at my work or lack thereof.  He was gazing at me!  And His eyes were full of infinite tenderness.