Lately, I've been discovering so many truths about God and discovering just how encompassing His love for me is. But with that comes this question… As someone who grew up in the church, why was this never taught to me before?
But then again, my church life growing up wasn't normal. For the first 14 years of my life, I found a home away from home. I loved going to church and I loved spending my free time there.
But at 14 something happened. I wasn't that cute kid anymore and hormones came into play. I was loud and I had an opinion about everything. As some would say, I was probably my youth directors worst nightmare. And I know for a fact that I really was. At 14, part of my church stopped loving me. And at that, the spiritual leaders of the church– the minister and the youth director– were the guiltiest members.
It was something I felt all the time, I felt disliked in my own home and it was enough to make me run away from God in a hurry. For a 14 year old kid, the leaders of the church are supposed to be the image of God and for them to not like me, well then why would God love me?
As I grew up, I switched churches and found a new youth group. I loved the new group but sometimes I felt the same way, that I wasn't loved. Not by the youth director but by other people in the church. Parents of other kids who didn't like what I did on Friday nights and other youth who could just be mean. I carried around this feeling of never being good enough for God because I never was good enough for the people of the church.
And throughout my entire time in the church growing up… I don't remember anyone ever telling me just how much God loved me. Nobody ever told me that no matter what all those other people thought, God loved me just the way I was and that there was NOTHING that I could do to make him love me less. Sure, I heard that God gave his son for me because he loved me but I never knew that HE LOVED ME just the way I was.
In all those youth conferences I went to and all those alter calls I heard, nobody ever explained to me that I was WORTHY of his love.
There always felt like there were stipulations on his love. Like don't have sex before marriage, don't drink and don't smoke, don't disrespect your parents, don't live a life of sin, don't have abortions, don't do this and don't do that… And if you do these things, then God will love you more.
But what about those who do those things? What about the kids who are struggling? How can we reach them with a gospel of don't do this and don't do that?
I know that when the preachers started preaching that, I tuned out because I felt like it made me unworthy of the kingdom. Even when they told me my sins were forgiven, I didn't feel worthy of that. Not after a message of how terrible of a person I was for all the bad things I had done, not after a life in the church where I constantly felt I was unworthy of being there because I didn't fit into a certain box.
Maybe it's something that comes during our own spiritual growth but it would have been great to have been loved by my church and told all the time how worthy I was of God's love no matter what I did. I would have loved to have been taught that there was nothing in my past, my present, or my future that was going to keep God from pursuing me and using me in his Kingdom.
"For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Romans 8:38-39
