I wonder if how I see God hinges a lot on how I believe God sees me, or maybe how I see myself. What does God think of me? What do I think of myself? If I don’t see myself as having any value, why would I believe Jesus died for me? We have value to Jesus even as sinners. I believe He sees what we could be – what we were meant to be – living in Eden… a beautiful, perfect life. But we aren’t in Eden anymore, we are living in a broken world where Satan has taken everything God has made good and beautiful and twisted it and came up with a counterfeit for it. And we try our very best to either kill our longings or to control them or Christianize them but never look too deeply at what our hearts are truly longing for because we fear we can’t have what we want.

For a long time I questioned, why am I here? Am I loved, wanted? I didn’t believe I had any worth. I wasn’t much more than trash. I was ashamed and filled with shame because of what had happened to me. I was sure if I could have somehow been “good enough” I wouldn’t have been abused. I could have somehow prevented bad stuff from happening to me. After all “God is great and God is good” and good stuff happens to good people, bad stuff happens to bad people. And then in church we’d sing that song, something about Jesus dying for such a worm as I. And I thought “yeah right, who dies for worms?” I sure wouldn’t. But I don’t feel much different than a worm looks. Slimy and gross, crawling around in the mud and muck, feeling dirty, ugly and used; so why would Jesus die for me? I’m crying now as I remember those feelings of worthlessness, ugliness, and my empty hurting heart. I’m crying for that lonely sad girl wishing she could have known how much she was loved and cared for by Jesus. I wish I would have known the Jesus I know now, but I also realize my heart had its own journey of healing to take and healing can take a long long time.

But what if I saw myself as God sees me? What if my heart was and is beautiful? What if God saw me as a special unique child of His? So I starting looking for answers to those questions and many more and the more answers I found, the more questions I had. And the deeper I went the more I became aware of this mystery about God and who He is. The more I learned, the more there is to learn and some questions won’t have answers till we meet Him face to face. I realized too for my heart to be able to really “get it” I’d have to be vulnerable and trust God and have faith in His promises but trusting is not a safe thing to do. Trusting means people take advantage of you, they hurt you. But trusting God is vastly different than trusting people. Yet I think we learn to trust God by first experiencing trust in people which is why it’s so important for us as Christians to look in our hearts and allow God to heal the broken places so we can be very intentional about showing Christ as accurately as we can to the people in our world.

Trust is the opposite of fear. But I will only trust to the same level that I allow myself to experience God’s love. How do I allow my heart to open and experience God’s love? By embracing and being honest with what I’m experiencing in my heart. I have asked God to come and live in my heart and so to know God better, more deeply I need to go where He is and that is looking into my heart and what’s in there. I’m not sure how or why it works but it seems the more honest and open I am with myself and talk to God about what I’m feeling, the more I experience God and His love. Maybe the emptier my heart is of fear, distrust, anxiety and anger there’s more room for God and His love.