Dear friend,
We have had many talks, you and I, about love. Like so many of us, you struggle to learn to be loved, to feel loved, to trust that love can both be known and know you.
Your days on this earth have not been full of love. You were not born to parents who could validate how very lovely you are. You did not feel embraced, protected, or cherished. You grew up limping in your soul, and you have made your way through all of that darkness to this moment in time.
This is your moment, have no fear about that. This moment is like sugar crystallizing into the sweetest rock your soul will ever know.
God has reached His hand out from heaven, and is writing your name on today. This is the day The Lord has made for you.
Being unloved in this treacherous world of sin is a great burden. When unloving thoughts dominate and form us, we do not learn the language of love. Then someone comes along and tells us God loves us. The gospel may as well be explained in Latin or Greek, it would make as much sense to our minds.
This is how the unloved soul gets stuck.
Let’s talk about the very beginning, before anyone was stuck. In the beginning, God spoke and he made all things. He formed people in His image from the dust.
And then he breathed life into them.
We are God’s very breath.
Have you ever tried to hold your breath for very long? Have you ever had a person smother your breath with their hand, or keep your head under the pool water in a rowdy game of chicken?
Think of what you would do to get your breath back, to be able to open your mouth and pull air back into your lungs and breathe again.
That is what happened to God; sin stole His breath.
God has always been determined to get His breath back. That is the definition of love- not a feeling, not an emotion, but an undying commitment to never be separated from that which is valuable and precious to you.
None of us have really been loved like that by fallen people. Nor have we been able to love like that, not every day, without failing.
But God has loved you like that since before you breathed your first breath.
When you stumbled through darkness, God was loving you- His breath- like that. He pointed your path over rocks and boulders, through fire and ice, to this moment, this conversation, this letter.
He wants to unveil light in your life. God wants you to know His love.
It isn’t your past that has to define you any longer. It is a simple, terrifying leap of faith to decide that what God says about us is more true than everything else that has ever been said about us.
But before you were a baby crying out for care, or a child calling for help in the middle of the night, or a hopeless teenager standing on a ledge, or a lonely lover with nowhere to turn, you were His breath.
Allow God the right to own you, to hold you, to breathe again on you as He longs to do.
Today can be the day you begin to believe your value comes simply from God’s own love for you. Hand all the unloving words and memories over to Him, and ask Him to breathe your life into His own.
This is the day God has made for you, my beloved friend. Don’t hold our breath a moment longer, let your lungs fill with His truth and know: You are loved.
In great love and faith,
Carrie
