This week in El Salvador 16 of us World Racers took a break from normal ministry and from the rest of the squad and instead had a week of ATL, or Ask The Lord.
Okay so I bet some of you read the summary of this post and saw the title and were thoroughly confused….or maybe worried a bit, but please stick with me as I reveal to you a little bit of what has been going on inside my head this week. I’m hoping it will be worth the wait.
So ATL. When I first heard that was what we would be doing for our week in El Salvador I was not excited. Whenever I thought about ATL it felt like people were always getting random images or words like “blue” and “chocolate chip cookie” and somehow would meet someone in a store wearing a blue shirt eating a chocolate chip cookie and then that person would accept Christ and I just wasn’t sure if I was the kind of person that that would happen to. I’m still not, but anyway. Coming into ATL I had a lot of reservations, but I figured there was a reason I was here and that the Lord would certainly use this week to grow and change me, no matter if I was “good” at ATLing or not.
When we got to El Salvador we had our first “team time” right after breakfast. During our meeting, our team leader said that whatever asking the Lord looked like to us was what we were supposed to do this week. She said that ATL is just living life and being open to what the Lord wants to show us. When she said that I immediately felt better about the week. She continued on saying that if the Lord was telling us to rest and simply spend time with Him alone rather than go out and do stuff then that was okay, whatever we needed to do to be where the Lord wants us was fine with her.
So that first morning I sat down and was journaling asking God all kinds of questions about where He wanted me to go this week, what He wanted me to do, who He wanted me to talk to….and I got radio silence. By the afternoon of our first day I was kind of discouraged. Then I had a really great coffee date with my team leader and we talked about a lot of great stuff. I learned more about her and she learned more about me. It was a cool bonding moment. As I left our little chat she gave me a few questions to pray over and ask the Lord about in regard to what people think of me and she was going to do the same, then we would meet up the next day and talk about what the Lord told us.
For the next two days I tried sitting down and praying about these questions and again got radio silence. My brain could not seem to focus on the task I was trying to accomplish and it just kept getting more and more frustrating. Finally I decided to put the questions aside and opened up my Bible. After reading for a bit I started journaling again with the focus simply on the question: Do I feel worthy of the Father’s love?
Soon my long sentences and paragraphs morphed into one sentence truths. Sentences like: I am loved. I never walk alone. You will not ever leave me. And finally, I do not need to be worthy of love because I have always had it.
Let me write that again: I do not need to be worthy of love because I have always had it.
Okay so I know that’s a bit of a strange statement so I’m going to explain. First let me share two definitions with you.
Worthy: having or showing the qualities that deserve the specified action or regard; Deserving effort, attention, or respect; having enough good qualities to be considered important, useful.
Earn: to receive as return for effort and especially for work done or services rendered; to come to be duly worthy of or entitled or suited to.
In the conversation discussing the Father’s love or love in general these two words come up a lot and are often used as opposites. People frequently say that you don’t have to earn love because you are already worthy of it without working for it. And that I’m sure is an encouraging statement, but to me it never was and I could never figure out why. Until I had some time to actually slow down and really process what was going on inside my head.
When I hear the word “worthy” I think of a young hero in a story who either wants to become a knight, or get the girl, or prove that he isn’t a loser. Now in order to do these things he must be deemed worthy, generally by a king or someone with power. To become worthy he must go on a quest to showcase his abilities and prove that he has what it takes to be a knight or to marry the girl. This is the image that pops into my head every time I hear the question: Do you feel worthy of love? And my answer is always no because I don’t believe that I have proven myself to be worthy, I have not done enough to earn my place.
For whatever reason, somewhere along the line in my Christian walk the words “earn” and “worthy” became synonymous with each other, even though looking at the definitions above they really aren’t. I have been approaching the Father as a villager trying to be worthy of a knighthood in order to stand by His side, trying to earn my place, which I can never do, rather than realizing that I am the princess who has been living in the palace, daily meeting with the King.
When I explained what I had learned to my team leader she said that she liked my analogy and then added on her own little bit saying, “a knight must be worthy and earn his place, but a princess? A princess just is.” She doesn’t have to do anything to get into the palace, to gain the King’s ear, to be worthy of her crown, because she was already born with all of it. She was born with all the privileges of royalty, getting to enjoy luxury, because she is a daughter of the King.
So even though the statement “you don’t have to earn love” is true, I have changed another common phrase simply to help me understand better the life and freedom I have been given in the Lord. I am not worthy of love, but that is because I am not a knight who has worked his way into the favor of the King. I am a princess, an heir to a throne, and I was born that way.
