So I know I’ve been writing a lot about misconceptions of God. Maybe because I’m in the process of tearing down my own. 

***

The other day, I got into my car with my family to head to an obligation we had that afternoon. As I was pulling out of the driveway, in the back of my mind I breathed some kind of one or two worded half-thought of a prayer for protection. As I was driving down the road a ways, the thought came again to actually pray for protection. You know how when you’re thinking something radical in your sleep and you wake up and find it doesn’t make as much sense as you thought? That’s how I felt in the moment. I was all focused on driving, but somewhere in the back of my brain, I remember thinking something about angels and protection and praying. Then out of nowhere, the thought came: Why pray for protection anyway when God wouldn’t even do that for me?

I don’t know what shook me up the most later that night; the thought that had crossed my mind, or the terrifying reality that later that day while driving, I almost had an accident—and God protected me.

***

It’s been hitting me harder that that is the mindset I’ve cherished for years, that that half-thought of a question is really an underlining lie I’ve built my perception of God on. I see it clearer now, that all my life I’ve been trying to convince God to love me and perhaps too, to convince myself of His love for me. As a kid, I grew up trying to do everything right, grew up a little blinded, a little Pharisee-like. I’ve been the ‘good kid’, naively legalistic trying to earn His love. And then grace hit me in the face and my world has been up-side down ever since. Grace takes you back to the very beginning, inevitably making you relearn everything you once thought you knew. It’s radical, life changing, but messy in the in between moments of learning LOVE and losing the lies you once believed. 

Because lies believed are lies lived out.

I don’t know what lies you’ve let build your God. But maybe the God you’ve pictured all your life isn’t really who He is. Maybe the God you’ve thought you’ve known is drastically different than the labels placed on Him, or perhaps the God you’ve determined not to believe in, isn’t at all who society has named Him as. Because if God were a torrent and anything and everything but LOVE, I wouldn’t believe in him either. But perhaps those lies have labeled Him someone He is not. Maybe God is on a whole new level of beautiful we’ve never dared to experience. Perhaps we’ve been seeing God through blurry lenses and inevitably have named Him someone He is not. 

I remember the first time the thought crossed my mind that God would do something good for me simply just because He loves me and wants to see me smile—and it blew me away. Because I’ve never doubted the power of God, but I never knew it was so hard to believe LOVE. It was never a question of if God could, but if God would. The silent, hidden doubts of my heart have always been doubts about LOVE. Why would God do anything for me anyway? Why would He answer my prayers for me? I know He can, but why would He? Why on earth would God, much less anyone else, ever do anything good for me, just because? Why would God care how I feel? Why would He care if I’m happy? I’ve never felt so inadequate, so unfit for life, so stupid, so unprepared, unqualified, undeserving, unworthy, helpless, and hopeless in all my life. 

And that’s the beauty that’s hard to believe sometimes. I AM unworthy. Completely unworthy and horribly undeserving. And He loves me anyway. There’s absolutely nothing I can do to earn His love. But for most everything in life, society has been taught to earn what they want. You work harder, you’ll attain success. For literally everything, humanity’s motto is, ‘try harder’. Just try harder and you’ll get better grades, try harder and you’ll be a better person. Try harder and you’ll overcome that addiction, try harder and maybe you’ll fix your problems. It’s been ingrained in our psyches that if we just try harder, perhaps we can be of some worth, perhaps we can be good enough. We become blind to Christ’s sacrifice and blind to grace. 

But ‘trying harder’ isn’t good enough because ‘trying harder’ depletes the purpose and reason for Christ’s death. 

Because the truth is, we will never be good enough. And that’s the whole reason Christ chose death: to be for you what you could never be for yourself. And yet, so often we refuse Him his highest honor by daring to live in a way that suggests we don’t really need His blood in the place of ours, don’t really need His life, His sacrifice. He gave us the gift of His life, and yet too often, we don’t even allow Him to die for us, stubbornly believing our own blood and sweat can get us to heaven. And somehow, He saw you and me—undeserving, hopeless, helpless—and saw something worth giving His very existence for. That’s LOVE. That’s grace. And the thing about grace is that once you see it, once you know LOVE, it will never leave you the same. 

You can’t experience LOVE without experiencing heart-change. 

I don’t know where you are in your life. But maybe God is more beautiful than you ever dared to believe.