At your weakest, most vulnerable moment, before any human being could have recognized you as a person—let alone seen you as attractive or desirable—even then, God delighted in you.
Pregnancy Help News
“I don’t get it,” said “Courtney,” a young woman seeking to recover from childhood sexual abuse. “If I don’t love myself because of the stuff I know about myself, how can God love me if He knows everything about me?”
She swiped a tear from her cheek.
Courtney was part of a small group of college-aged women seeking help from past trauma. These courageous young women were learning to connect the dots between what had happened to them and their low self-worth and relational challenges.
On this particular night, each hit an emotional wall. Though they believed God loved them on an intellectual level, it was another matter for that truth to drop from each woman’s head to her heart.
Each woman had bought the lie that she was damaged goods, unworthy of love. Each woman struggled to grasp how God could truly love her. It’s a common dilemma, isn’t it? How many of us fail to comprehend—more importantly, accept and embrace—the love of God?
Father, help me, I prayed silently. Give me wisdom to help them accept Your acceptance. Inspiration came. I turned to my daughter-in-law and co-leader.
“When Lainey was born,” I asked, referring to Jamé’s 10-month-old baby girl, “What could she do for you?”
Jamé smiled and shook her head. “Nothing,” she replied.
“But she did mess her diapers, right?” I pressed. “And she cried a lot, even at night when you were exhausted?”
“She still does,” Jamé laughed.
“Since she can’t do a thing for you, and she is so messy and noisy and needy,” I said, “Why do you love her?”
Jamé thought for a moment, then beamed. “Because… she’s mine.”
I turned to the girls and told them one at a time, “God says ‘You’re mine…You’re mine … You’re mine.” The light of revelation began to dawn in each woman’s eyes.
We read from Psalm 139:
“You have searched me, LORD, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you, LORD, know it completely. You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain….
For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be."
I shared how, even before these young women were born, God planned, designed and carefully crafted each one of these women. He loved them as zygotes and embryos and fetuses, long before they ever entertained the twisted notion that they somehow needed to earn His love.
They already bore His image even then. They already delighted His heart. And nothing in their lives or circumstances—nothing—would change that.
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