I thought knew who Jesus was.

I don’t; but I’m learning.

It’s said that people often see God/Jesus the way they saw their parents.  I absolutely see that being true.  I saw Him being someone that I had to work hard to be accepted by, that I had to constantly be earning His love and that nothing I did would ever be good enough.

I heard the message of Grace and Mercy; how I was loved beyond anything I could imagine and that I did not have to earn God’s love.  I heard the words but the message did not click.  Nothing clicked.

I worked, I told God in my prayers, in my journal and in my actions that I was worthy of being accepted and loved by Him.

I thought that as long as I smiled at the grumpy guy at the pharmacy that I was sharing the love and that was good enough.

My asking the checkout girl at King Soopers about her day and how busy she’s been was exactly what God was after.

Making sure that I served at the Rescue Mission or in the nursery once a month was what I needed to do to show God I had it covered.

Those were outward things.  Outward because I always did outward things to show my parents I loved them.  Mostly after Abigail was born and things had settled.

I would bring home an extra milkshake or dessert for my mom.  I would make sure the house was extra clean because I knew they liked it that way.

I would try and keep Abigail quiet because I didn’t want to upset the delicate balance in their house.

None of it mattered because I couldn’t make them love me.  They had decided long ago that I was unloved.  Now that I know this it makes sense to me that I would do anything to earn the love of this God I had just come to know.

All these messages I was hearing never sank in.  They never made sense.  I wanted them too but they never did.  I wanted to believe that this God of the Universe could love me unimaginably but why, why would he love me.

No one ever had.

I didn’t know any of this.  I didn’t know that I God could just LOVE me.  Me for me in all my messiness.

Enter Jesus.

Realizing who Jesus is as a part of the Trinity helped me formulate this idea of the of the love of God.

My life has been messy for a really long time.  So has my relationship with God; I never understood the trinity until recently.  Jesus in his human form but also as his god-man was a confusing concept for me.  The more I left my fundamentalism roots the more I began to see Jesus in a different light.

It was a beautiful light.

The more I read the Gospels I began to see Jesus as someone who noticed people.  He saw beyond the exterior that they showed people and into their souls.

The woman who bled for 12 years and crawled through a crowd to touch Him; he saw her.  He not only saw her he wanted everyone in the crowd to see her as well.  The text says that Jesus felt the power go out of Him and that he asked who touched him.  But he already knew that it was her.  He reached down and he pulled her up.  I can only imagine her shocked reaction as this Messiah she had had come to know reached down to touch her when no one else would.

They were in the middle of a crowd and He made sure that everyone saw her, that everyone who wouldn’t go near her because of her bleeding saw Him heal her.

That is the Jesus I came to know and love.

I have been feeling this darkness sweep over me and now knowing the humanity of Christ is a beautiful thing.

I was always come to the Garden of Gethsemane when I feel my most hopeless because this is where I see Jesus in His full humanity.  He wept, He ached, He sobbed and lied in the dirt and begged His father to take this thing away from Him that He knew He was going to have to do anyways.

I don’t doubt that this season of darkness is purposeless.  I don’t doubt that somehow I’ll come out of the fire a little more refined than I was before but still smelling like smoke because that’s where the story is.

I don’t always understand why or even anymore do I ask because it proves fruitless, sometimes there isn’t a reason.

But now I see more of Jesus in His full human form, the Jesus who wept, and knelt and asked His Father why.

As Always,

Bethany

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