Loved and Lovely
Scripture says that God is a perfect Father. It says He loves us as a mother loves her own children. God cannot lie. He cannot feel or believe something that is a lie. He is love and His love is perfect. Therefore, the feelings God has towards me must be the feelings that a mother feels towards her own, but with absolute perfection.
As a mom, I have had certain moments wherein I am operating with a heart full of God-breathed love for my children. Nothing else can come close to explaining the experience. Sin has tainted my very existence on this earth but sometimes God gives us flashes of what perfect love is. Like when I held my babies for the first time. After long separations each time, I had sobbed and mourned for the opportunity to just be with them. I had sacrificed my very body on an operating table to birth them. When I held them for the first time there was nothing they could have done, no imperfection in themselves that could have reduced or removed the perfection of love I felt for them. I saw them and I knew they were precious. I knew they were mine. I knew they were lovely. I knew they were worthy of my love because I knew they were mine, and that they were of me. This truth emanated from my very being because I loved them as a mother.
Even in the day to day anxieties of toddler mom life, I sometimes get this feeling of perfection in love. I wash their feet and comb their hair and rock them and talk to them gently and I know they are precious from the deepest parts of my being, regardless of how hard the day has been.
This perfect love is how God feels about me all day of every day, and from eternity. When God, who is love in perfection as a Father and as a Mother, sees me, He sees His Son. He knows I am of Him and He loves me. He feels and believes that I am lovely. That I am precious. That I am perfect in Christ. Because He feels these feelings towards me they must be true because God cannot lie or contradict Himself. And I know that this is how He feels towards me because this is what it means to love as a mother loves.
In His perfection of love His feelings don’t change when I change or mess up. He is the perfect lover and the Son whom He sees when He sees me is the perfection of loveliness. Therefore, I can know that I am loved, and that I am lovely.
