Love changes everything.
One of my favorite professors taught me that you can’t truly love anyone else until you understand how much God loves you. If you aren’t allowing yourself to receive his love, you don’t really have any love to give to others. And once you’ve experienced that love, you’ll never be the same.
That is the single most important thing I learned in all four and a half years I spent in college.
I’ve heard that God loves me my entire life. But I didn’t believe it for a long time.
When I was little, all I understood about God was that he made the earth and all the people, he was with us all the time, and he had a lot of rules(and terrible things would happen to me if I broke those rules). He was also supposed to be my father. Oh, and he loves us.
From what I knew about fathers, thinking of God as a father made it impossible for me to believe that he loved me. The older I got, the more I hated hearing the phrase “Jesus loves you.” I thought, “No, he doesn’t. If he does, why isn’t he taking care of me?”
Finally when I was eight years old, I’d had it. With all that he had let happen to me in my short life, there was no way he actually cared about me; he probably had forgotten that I even existed. I prayed and told God that I hated him, I wanted nothing to do with him, and could he please just leave my life alone.
Then when I was ten, it was our youth pastor’s last Sunday with us before he was moving to Ohio. He was awesome, and he was one of only two men in the world that I trusted(the second being my granddad).
So that day, Adam was telling us how much he loved all of us and that he’d miss us when he was gone. I believed that. Then he said, “But I don’t need you to remember that.” Huh? He turned to the whiteboard behind him and wrote in huge letters, GOD LOVES YOU. I rolled my eyes and wondered what that had to do with anything. He told us, “I don’t care if you remember that I cared about you guys. I don’t even care if you forget who I am, as long as you never forget that God loves you. That’s the most important thing I can ever teach you.”
That was the first time I ever began to wonder if those three words were actually true. I knew that Adam loved us, and I didn’t think he’d lie to us. Maybe God was for real after all.
I forgot that speech for the next three years, then I went to Camp La Vida and met tons of people who not only loved me, but talked all the time about God. They didn’t talk about all the do’s and don’ts like I’d always heard at home; they talked about who God was, how much he loved us, and how important it was to tell other people about him. That was when I realized that God wasn’t a mean, angry judge who went around waiting to hurt me when I did something wrong. There was still so much more that I didn’t understand about him, but I knew now that he loved me, and I wanted to love him too. And so I prayed and asked him into my life, having no idea what that was going to do to me.
It’s been twelve years since I sat on that couch in Sunday school and heard that God loved me more than my hero of a youth pastor did, and almost nine years since I laid on my bunk in cabin 10 and let that truth change my life. I spent the past six summers at the camp where I got saved, telling my girls on the last night of every week the same speech that Adam gave us kids before he left us. And now I’m about to spend 11 months sharing that love in 11 different countries.
The more deeply I understand God’s love for me, the more it changes the way I see other people, and the more it makes me want them to know his love for themselves. I want to love people in a way that points them to the one who loves them infinitely more than I know how to. I want to see God change lives with his love the same way he changed mine.
Because love changes everything.
