Wrestling with Being Loved | The Easter Week Series
Elizabeth Moore
“lord
make room
for the rebellious one i am”
Dear no one in particular and everyone,
I’m wrestling with being loved. It's Thursday, and as I explore the darkness of my humanity, I am ashamed.
I look into the eyes of my savior on trial, firelight flickering between us, and I know that I will fail Him. I already have.
When I come face to face with my nothingness--my inability to earn anything--I want to hide.
Because this isn't the way I want to be seen or the way I want love to work. I want to earn it. I want to deserve it. I want to prove that I’m worthy of you and will always come through for you.
I want to be the strong one, the one who always puts her big rocks in first, the one who knows how to render a firm no but also open herself up, the one who says the wise things, the one who knows the balance between pouring out her life and taking care of herself.
I want to be the hero, the safe place, the savior. I want to show you that I'm worthy of being pursued.
But I was never meant to carry a weight that heavy. I am not the savior, and we should all be thankful for that.
“For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do.”
I feel like me and Peter are cut from the same cloth: passionate people-pleasers who want to save the day and prove ourselves. We're either all-in or all-out, hyper-zealous or closed-off.
We are weak, Peter and I.
We want to control. We want to make you love us. We want to prove to you and to ourselves that we're worthy of love.
And we need the Lord's kindness to painfully break us.
I see Peter in the courtyard with the servants, and I get it. Or at least, I think I do. The fear he must have felt as He watched His Rabbi's body and reputation crumble. The shame he must have felt after failing his friend and rejecting His Lord, obscenely denying their relationship.
Peter failed as a friend and as a follower, and I get him. He wept bitterly, mourning his sin and himself, and I get that too.
But even in his failure, even in my failure, the Lord is kind. The Lord knows us, He remembers that we are dust, and we don't prove anything to Him.
He knows that we hate Him, that we reject Him, that we are incapable of contributing anything healthy to the relationship on our own. We are dead. We are enemies. We are a wilderness of dry bones.
He knows all this. And still he chooses us, loves us, pursues us.
He is so kind to our broken selves. And, often, His kindness on earth comes with pain. But it will always end in eternal good. Always. It will end in healing and redemption and abundance.
So, on Thursday, I'm wrestling with being loved. I'm struggling to accept that the Lord is about to sacrifice everything for me when I've done nothing but hate Him.
But I am loved. Not because I’m lovely but because God is Love. He covers my unloveliness with Himself.
So I’m praying that He changes me and saves me from being such a sinful woman, such a messy person. I’m asking Him to teach me how to accept His righteousness as my own and how to live in it. I'm asking for a humble heart to accept and respond to His love, because it has nothing to do with me.