..will you stay with me????????

core needs.. every newborn, made by God in the image of God, yet born into a fallen, broken world has them..

the need to know this without a shadow of a doubt:

are you welcoming me, are you excited to know me, know all about me?
do you love me?
will you stay with me? no matter what I might do?
will you keep me safe?
will you LOVE me.....

there is not a parent in this world that will ever get this right.. because we are all broken, selfish and even as we are being restored by God who is meeting all these core needs, we will mess things up.....

God is aware of that.. He allows it.. it is because He wants nothing more than for us to realize our NEED for Him.. that He alone will meet all these core needs.. He alone is able to meet them..

looking back on my childhood, my adulthood, my relationships, being a girl and relationships being what defines me, I can so easily see how I have been looking for those core needs to be met.. just to be disappointed again and again..

I met the One who meets the core needs almost 20 years ago... I know He will never leave me .. He will always stay with me.. I know that He delights over me with singing and is always right there and wants to know everything about me...
He is there to lead me and guide me and to work out in me this tension we as human beings just can't get our heads around: that He loves us the way we are and because of this love is constantly working on us to be even better... but that no matter what we will mess up on the way, He will never love us more than He did in the first place...

somehow in my life experience this makes no sense.. if I am challenged to be better, how can I be good right now? growing up in a perfectionist, critical environment, home, school and country really, if I needed to get better I definitely was not good at all.... the one little thing that was wrong totally negated anything that was good...  criticizing as a way of motivating one to do even better..... it is a harsh place to live in...

so.. He loved me enough to die for me when I never even did want anything to do with Him, when I so obviously was a sinner, nothing to offer to Him at all... huge, and so foolish in the world's economy..
yet it is true... He loves me so much, and since He made me, He knows my potential.. He loves me because of who He is, not because of who I am.. He loves me because I am a treasure to Him, for me to want to know Him more and more is to make Him VERY HAPPY...

as much as we as parents fall short of how we should love our children we can maybe understand a little the love He has for us... as parents we love for our kids to come to us, with all their hurts, fears and failures and all we want to do is to comfort them and to encourage them.. they can even hurt us and reject us and we still love them.. right???

so, do you know Him this way?? Do you believe that He loves you and that this love has nothing to do with how much you do or change for Him? do you realize that because maybe our parents loved us with conditions, we might have this wrong idea we have to earn His love? the truth is we never could... and He loves us anyway...  this is what makes me love Him even more and want to serve Him and please Him... not me trying to be worthy but worshipping Him in spirit and in truth because of who He is.. and because He first loved me.... <3