You Are Loved

African worship is beautiful. There is dancing, and shouting and singing. There is no holding back in African worship and I know God delights in it. It is just beautiful to Him, and I have been enjoying it as well. But as you can imagine, sometimes I just need intimate quiet times of worship as well. I love to dance, I love to shout, I love to sing at the top of my lungs, but I love to sit, and I love to feel God’s presence in an intimate way as well. African believers know very well how to enter into His courts with thanksgiving and praise, but there isn’t much of “being still and knowing that He is God,” if you know what I mean.
The other day, I went to service held at the YWAM Soroti base, and we were praising God. There was a young woman that began to praise God in Ateso, and I had no clue what she was saying. In my other adventures in Latin America, I could figure out the words, but here I am left in the dark. So I just began to pray that God would show me how to praise him in the midst of a language barrier and cultural barrier as well. I was determined to praise him whether I felt like it or not, so I just sought his heart. Meanwhile the African people were jumping and singing and dancing and reveling in God. One older woman waddled up to me and shouted in my ear “God, he loves me, He really loves me”. I am sure you have experienced the Holy Spirit move, but I had never experienced him move so powerfully before. It was as if Jesus Christ walked into the room and put arms around me and said, “Lauren, I love you, I really love you.” I just stood there and tears poured out of my eyes. It was as if the hard shell around my heart was torn down and love, intimate, passionate, pursuing love, was spoken right to it. I must have looked silly. Little muzungu crying at an Ateso song, but in that moment God reminded me, as he so often does, that he loves me.
After the service God just kept on speaking to me, and he really laid it on my heart to write about it. I am convinced that we don’t understand his love. I know I don’t. He is wildly in love with each and every one of us. He is intimately involved and engaged in our lives. Paul said that nothing could separate us from his love. Nothing. “Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any power, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Savior” (Romans 8 8:38-39).
I wish I could look each of you in the eyes and just tell you “He is radically in love with you. No one has ever or can ever love you as he does. His love is relentless. He is crazy about you and no one can take that away. No sin, no failure can ever make him love you less. No achievement, no greatness can ever make him love you more. He is so in love with you.” Jesus Christ, the son of the living God, is wildly, passionately, relentlessly, in love with you. He thinks about you constantly. He never leaves your side. He is right there with you.
Even after writing this, I don’t understand, but I know that He will continue to reveal it to me and to you. My words and my writing cannot express his love for you, it is merely a poor reflection of the reality of his pure love for you. But take joy in the fact that you are loved without bound or limit, that the God of the universe is so intimately involved in your life that he created you and knows everything about you. No one has ever or will ever love you like he does.
I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes about the love of God moving us to action. "The only lasting freedom from self-consciousness comes from a profound awareness that God loves me as I am, not as I should be. He loves me beyond worthiness and unworthiness, beyond fidelity and infidelity. He loves me in the morning sun and the evening rain without caution, regret, boundary, limit, or breaking point; that no matter what I do, He cannot stop loving me. When I am really in conscious communion with the reality of the wild, passionate, relentless, stubborn, pursuing, tender love of God in Jesus Christ for me, then it’s not what I’ve got to or I must or I should or I ought; suddenly I want to change because I know how deeply I am loved.” Brennan Manning

In His Loving Hands,
Lauren