I DON’T WANT GOD TO LOVE ME.
February 2012
I have a transactional dynamic with God.
A give-and-take where I do my part and He does His. I go to church, give to charity, and love my neighbor. In return, He keeps me safe and pays the bills.
This allows me to avoid having any kind of honest or vulnerable interaction with the Divine, letting me feel comfortable and in control of my life.
Surprisingly, this has actually worked for a really long time…
Until now.
After years of entertaining the notion that our interactions were symbiotic, God is strangling my idolatry to death before my eyes.
No more trades.
No more deals.
No more negotiations.
Now I can see that I don’t want God to love me. I want Him to tell me what to do and then leave me alone.
Because coming to grips with the fact that God actually loves me requires me to acknowledge a worth in me far greater than I can bear.
Of course I want God’s favor in my life and I want to be happy—we all do—but do I really want God to know me?
Me knowing God means I’m brought into the presence of the Totally Awesome, but God knowing me means He has to poke around my heart.
Who knows what He’ll find.
Not really the kind of swap I was hoping for in my transactional encounters with the Divine.
I just want to figure out what makes Him tick and then use that to get on His good side. (It’s the same thing I do in other relationships.)
I don’t want people to know me, I want them to like me.
If people like me they won’t see my faults. If they do, maybe they won’t care. And if I can’t get them to like me, I’ll try to position myself just outside the reach of their “normal” lives.
I’ve done this in my career, attempting to hide my insecurity by creating a larger-than-life persona for others to celebrate with accolades, awards, and honors. Such achievements leave me untouchable by mere mortals and allow me to insulate myself from the pain of vulnerability.
There is nothing like praise, adoration, and constant solicitations for advice to help me forget that I have no idea what I’m doing.
I still struggle with this in writing these essays and working on REHUMANIZE. I avoid working inwardly by thinking outwardly about what others might need or want to hear, or about what will make me look attractive, gifted, or wise.
When I focus on my audience, I sink. I forget that I create out of identity, not for it. I forget that I create to find myself—which has a way of leading me back to the love of God.
When I focus on the present moment of what God is doing in me, I somehow keep afloat.
I’m trying to be more vulnerable, but I still find ways to say to others, “Hey, I’m doing awesome, no need to probe any further!”
“Nothing to see here people, move along,” is my modus operandi.
But that’s not what I really want.
What I really want is to be known at the depths of who I am, for who I really am. But I assume from experience that whenever anyone gets too close they seem to get disappointed or disgusted and leave.
So it’s not that I don’t want to be known—it’s that I think I know what happens when others get too close and see me for who I really am.
And that’s why I keep God at arm’s length.
I can’t have God lurking around the depths of my heart. I can’t afford for Him to see me for who I really am. He ain’t gonna like—let alone approve—of what He finds.
There’s skeletons in my closet. (And for that matter, there are probably bodies down there that aren’t even dead yet.)
And then…
God wrecks me as I realize that while I’ve been tidying up the living room, He’s been sitting with the skeletons in my closet, waiting for me to join Him.
Not only does God know about my junk, He’s been sitting squarely in it, offering me unlimited unconditional love, acceptance, and approval.
Unfazed by the stench of death, God comes from within the brokenness of my life to rescue me, not from outside of it.
He’s not waiting for me to tidy up before I let Him in. He’s already inside waiting to blow the place wide open, starting with the closets.
This God doesn’t wait for an invitation to live within me. He just makes Himself at home while insisting that I may live in Him.
It leaves me thankful, and thinking that maybe love doesn’t always wait for an invitation after all.
Love never manipulates, intimidates, or dominates, and it always overcomes.
Love wins because there’s no way God isn’t going to get what He wants.
Admitting “I don’t believe God loves me and that I just want Him to tell me what to do” is not a confession of my will, nor is it the desire of my heart.
It’s an observation of my actual response to the love of God in my life so far.
Saying I believe in something and then acting contrarily is called being out of integrity with myself.
It’s when I say my body is a temple but I treat it like an amusement park.
It’s when I say I trust God for provision in my life as I hoard money and resources like a scared orphan.
And it’s when I say I want to selflessly love my wife as I make sex all about me.
I want the love of God.
I want to be able to take down the barbed-wire barricades in my heart so I can feel His love—but I don’t know how.
For now I can only surrender that I don’t know how to surrender as I give to God the helplessness of not knowing how to give Him all that is me.
I keep sweeping the floors of my heart because I don’t know how to put the broom down and walk into the closet with Him.
And so my leap of faith today is that I choose to trust Him in that closet without me.
I acknowledge that He’s sitting in the middle of my deepest, darkest secrets and desires, waiting patiently in complete awareness of His surroundings.
He isn’t freaking out.
(And He isn’t quoting Bible verses at me.)
I realize the “correct answer” at this point would be to say that I’m putting the broom down and walking into the closet with Him.
But I have no idea what it really means to put the broom down today, and I’m tired of conjuring up the correct answers at the expense of experiencing freedom and love.
So I’m not gonna do it.
I can choose to be “correct,” or I can choose to be free in honesty and integrity, accepting that I have no clue what I’m doing.
One god requires I tidy up before he visits, while this God sits in the closet holding up my skeletons with a huge grin on His face.
Because the skeletons in my closet don’t prevent me from experiencing the love of God.
They’re an invitation into it.