Most of us have at least a handful of people in our lives who truly love us for who we are and not for what we can do. The rest of the world cares for us only to the extent that we meet their expectations. Most of the voices we hear come from people who want something from us. No wonder it’s so hard to tune our hearts to the voice of the one who calls us beloved just because we’re His.
— Jonathan Martin, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You’re More Like Jesus Than You Think?
I find this to be very true. It’s not a criticism of others, even those we call friends, to realise that they do not (and perhaps cannot) truly love us for who we are, irrespective of what we do and don’t do, what we succeed at and what we make a catastrophic mess of. Few are the people to whom we can truly bare our souls without fear of being judged at some level. And because that kind of human relationship is so rare, we learn to hide ourselves and only disclose what we think it’s safe to let others see – that which we hope others will perceive as respectable, admirable and praiseworthy.
In his book The Beatitudes, Simon Tugwell puts it like this (quoted in the late Brennan Manning’s wonderful book Abba’s Child):
And so, like runaway slaves, we either flee our own reality or manufacture a false self which is mostly admirable, mildly prepossessing, and superficially happy. We hide what we know or feel ourselves to be (which we assume to be unacceptable and unlovable) behind some kind of appearance which we hope will be more pleasing. We hide behind pretty faces which we put on for the benefit of our public. And in time we may even come to forget that we are hiding, and think that our assumed pretty face is what we really look like.
We’re so used to unconsciously managing what we disclose to others that we often try to relate to God in the same way. The irony is that He sees straight through all our pretence and our masks, and He loves us anyway – not because we are in some way uniquely deserving of love, but because He is love, and because we are His, made in His image. His hope is that we will find our identity as the beloved – an identity that starts and ends not in anything we say or do, but in His heart of love. We are the beloved simply because He is the one who is love and we are in Him.
“We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in His love. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect.” (1 John 4:16-17)
