Loved

Can you share a positive example of where you’ve felt loved?

I feel loved when I open the fridge and it’s full of food.

I feel loved when I’m warm.

I feel loved when I can close my eyes and feel the sunshine on my face.

I feel loved when my husband makes brownies.

But I really feel it because I’ve known a deeper love.

I was 15 years old and on a confirmation camp with the Methodist church that I’d grown up in. The site was a dazzlingly green forest somewhere in the Kwa-Zulu Natal midlands in South Africa.

I remember sitting on that rough carpet floor typical of simple, cheap camp halls, with a group of similarly aged boys and girls. The youth pastor sat on the floor with us and asked us:

“Who knows what grace is?”

There were some responses that I don’t remember at all.

He went on:

“Grace is undeserved love. It’s the love that God has for you. It’s love that is for you no matter what you’ve done. It’s the love shown when Jesus died on the cross. He died because he loves you.”

Not merely accepted, not merely tolerated, not simply told to keep going to the next level.

Loved.

I’d been to Sunday School all my life. I had read my Bible every night. But I had not heard this. I needed someone to tell me this.

And something clicked. Like most girls my age I was plagued by a constant sense of not being good enough, of not working hard enough, a sense that we’re not going to make it. And suddenly I felt something completely new.

A person who loved me with the deepest purest love.

And I felt all put together. Words were clearer. I felt connected where before I had felt immaterial.

I felt confident. Human. It was all going to be ok.

The next day, I sat on a hillside with a gentle older woman and for some reason I wept. There and then I responded to that love. And said thank you to Jesus.

“Sometimes the Lord heals us with tears,” she said.