Loved

You wake up to the morning light on your face.  This was not the time you should have gotten up for the day. Irritated you hit the snooze button--repeating the process again and again until at length you find yourself rolling out of bed to rush off for work.

You stifle the remorse running through your nerves, but something is lost in the quiet of the morning. Time to see God; time to be without requirements.  The day is already upon you and you will work through your duties with reluctant decision, but not joy.

Occasionally worries and fears enter your heart to pierce that unsteady form within, but you let it pass thru as you go to the next task, unsatisfied with the resolution of avoidance.  "How did I come to feel this way?" you may ask, "Nothing has changed since yesterday."

Just yesterday you had felt some measure of peace, but now you feel doubt about your life and prospects.  Why is it so much harder to get through the day?

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I think that when our hearts are despairing, when life feels impossibly difficult or overwhelmingly painful, we have lost true perspective for our lives.  We may be thinking of something in particular that is bothering us (love, finances, family, what have you), and to be sure, it is bothering us, but deep down inside I think we just want to know everything will be all right someday, that we will be faithfully cared for by someone who is stronger than us--in short, that we will be loved.  We therefore despair not only for the broken and hopeless causes in our lives, but for a lack of recognition of the truth: God truly loves us,  irrespective of how great we are or how great we believe we have failed.

Christ's sacrifice has shown us that love.  That's a fact that neither circumstances nor emotions can touch.  We're clean now too if we have believed in Him.  That's a fact as well.  I think that if we pondered God's love for us and really let that soak into our hearts, if it became real to us for just the first moments of the day, half the things we are tempted to worry about thereafter wouldn't be so much of an issue.  We would have peace in resting in the truth of His love, and then whatever comes, we would reckon ourselves His and safe in His arms.

May God give me the grace then to bear these things in mind as I live my own life.

"Why are you in despair, O my soul?  And why have you become disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him, The help of my countenance and my God."

-Psalm 42:11