When I hear the words, “God loves you,” sometimes I struggle to believe them.
Why would He love the wretched person I have sometimes been? The sin, the selfishness, the ugliness, and the mistakes scattered throughout my human journey. Knowing all of it, how could His love still be possible?
Maybe the answer is that God sees something in us that we often cannot see in ourselves.
He sees beyond the thinking, fearful, ego-driven self. Beyond the mind that judges, compares, condemns, and separates. The mind can become the barrier between us and God, convincing us that our failures define us. But God looks beyond our unconsciousness and sees what remains underneath it all—the soul. The eternal part of us that came from Him and still belongs to Him.
Someone recently asked me about Heaven and Hell and whether this life is simply a one-shot deal. I don’t pretend to know the mysteries of eternity, but my response was this: God is not linear. He is not confined to this, then that; beginning, then end. God is everything—here, now, and infinitely beyond this speck of dust we call Earth.
Perhaps this human journey is one chapter in something so vast that our minds could never comprehend it. Perhaps we have taken a billion bites from the proverbial apple, learning again and again that the way back to God begins with the death of the false self—the wretched individual I spoke of above. Not the death of our existence, but the surrender of the ego that insists it knows who we are.
And this is where Jesus becomes so meaningful to me.
God knows the perfect self even when we cannot find it. Christ comes to rescue us from sin, but also from the prison of our own minds—from ego, shame, fear, judgment, and the belief that our worst moments are our true identity.
God knows who we are beneath all the clutter of our human existence.
Maybe that is why He can love us when we struggle to love ourselves.
He is not fooled by the mess on the surface. He sees all the way through it.
He sees the soul.
And beneath everything we have accumulated, everything we have done, and everything we mistakenly believed ourselves to be, there remains something that came from God and longs to return to God.
Love.
A love that transcends the mind.
A love that transcends our failures.
A love that transcends space and time.
“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.” — 1 Corinthians 13:12
