i always heard i was loved, but i didn't always know i was loved. later, i finally knew i was loved, but only because i knew i needed love, only because i was deperate.

lately, i've forgotten i am loved, or perhaps i've heard it too much, or what i really think it is, is that i've just forgotten that i still need love. needing love, i think, is essential to feeling loved.

...because it's easy to love someone who is loveable. is it really love, then? it's more convenience, comfort, pleasure, interest, or the act of liking. it's a fuzzy feeling. whatever loving the loveable is, it's easy, and one thing i've learned all over the place is that love isn't easy and, usually, easy isn't love. so, if you're asking me, the answer is no, it's not love, not in the truest sense of the word, anyway.

so of course, when i see myself as loveable, forgetting i'm still so far from being so, which is happening all too frequently, i'm not going to feel truly loved. i'm going to feel conveniently and expectedly befriended.

and when i'm loveable and conventiently befriended, the lover becomes an equal, a peer, a pal, a buddy. i'm loving him, and so, of course, he's loving me, and we're all getting along. and we approve of each other and maybe we could go out and chat and relax and joke and enjoy each other's company, at least seemingly so, knowing somewhere up there that i am loved, flippantly and expectantly so, but not really feeling loved, not truthfully or deeply or genuinely so.

and how do i reach this point?! how do i think with my brain and speak with my lips of vast things like holiness or goodness or omniptence or justice or, of all things, glory, and yet, in my mind and soul and actions, and in my desperate ugly heart of all places, arrive at this place of familiarity, flippant convenience, two pals going out for a drink? my brain talks about all of things i am not, and my heart goes its own way bragging of all the things i am.

if anyone could have felt comfortable and familiar around christ, it would have been john the baptist, the chosen forerunner--and even cousin if i'm not mistaken--the man who baptized the messiah himself. and yet, what did he tell everyone? he told them that even he was far too unworthy to bend down in front of christ, reach towards his smelly, calloused, dirty feet, and untie his shoe. the man wearing those shoes was far too holy, far too good, far too powerful, far too just, and of all things, far too glorious for him to take part in even these lowliest acts of service.

if anyone could have felt comfortable and familiar around christ, it would have been paul, the chosen missionary and forefather of the church. and what did he tell everyone? in light of christ's glory, paul was the lowest of the apostles, the worst of all sinners, the least deserving of the entire human race.

so if the baptizing forerunner and the evangelizing forefather are unloveable, what do i have that is loveable? if they, of all people, are unworthy, how am i, of all people, worthy? (those are rhetorical questions whose answers, i assume, are evident.)

glory! this man is GOD, the central character in this supernatural cosmic drama, the creator of the universe, and on and on we could go! what makes me think i can call him up and take him out for a drink?!

and so how did i get here, and how do i arrive here time and time again? most days, i take my gifts and talents--the mind, the thoughts, the words god himself has given me--and i use them in the worst sense, i use them to gain some sort of self-serving ground, i pervert them, i spin them upside-down using them to promote myself rather than putting them to their true use of promoting the only one worthy of promotion.

oh! how do i find myself here?! it's a mere--what?!--8 inches?! 12 inches?! between the brain, mouth, and heart! so where do these things escape and lose themselves?! where along the awy do they become so twisted and tainted?!

and how can we (oh yes, we've all done it) be so audacious to sit in sunday school, laughing and poking fun at those poor disciples who mess up over and over again?

"i need more grace than i thought...oh brother, i'm far, i'm far away away from everything good! you, my hidden pearl of pure and perfect love...and i'm the living example of 100 percent the opposite of this!"

and so, how humbling, then, to be reminded this advent season that i--even me, as loveable as i think i am--am starving for truth and starving for grace and it is for this very reason a tiny, messy, screaming infant was born full of grace and truth, ready to be given freely. how humbling to be reminded that i am unloveable and for that reason, this baby, coming to a world corrupt, deprived, ugly, perverted, underserving, worthless, and unloveable, is LOVE in the truest sense of the word.

how thrilling, then, to sing, "to show god's love aright, she bore to us a savior when half spent was the night...true man, yet very God, from sin and death he saves us and lightens every load."