You Are Loved

This Sunday I will be preaching at the church my family and I attend. I have done this a few times and feel honored to have the opportunity to speak to a large group about the things of my heart and my heart's walk with God. I have entitled my talk, "You are Loved."

A few weeks ago, I attended a service at a different church where the minister mentioned that all minister really only have one, or maybe two, messages, which they give over and over in different ways. This resonated with me, and I immediately asked myself: what is your message?

The message I feel most strongly has been given to me by Spirit is just this: you are loved. It is the message I have learned and re-learned, received and been challenged, by my entire life. It is also the message I feel most profoundly in contact with as a teacher. I have so many minor and occasional major travails in my own life, trials I pass through without as much grace as I wish, and daily struggles that I do not handle with the ministerial perfect love and calm I dream I might continuously possess! But when I go inside and really look at myself, I find one area in which God has truly trained and taught me, where I have slowly year by year gained insight and ability, and that is this: you are loved.

Several months ago, I went through an experience I had never encountered before, and came up against some actions by others that some people would label "evil." Certainly they were intended for harm and a great deal of anger, misunderstanding and resentment came my way, striking close to my heart. I processed these events on many levels, constantly seeking a higher way of viewing the situation (and constantly finding lower ways too!), and got through it all right. However, many weeks later, I still felt a residual sense of being somehow deserving of the hatred and unkindness that I was shown.

One night, just as I was going to bed, I had the realization that I was struggling, as I have in the past, with a sense of being unloved. The people who showered me with anger really didn't love me, and it threw me back, just the littlest bit, into a place of doubt and lingering unworthiness. As though God were speaking directly to me, I got this message: "You need to have a deeper experience of God's love for you, not an intellectual understanding, but a felt event."

I keep meditating on this idea. It is possible, particularly for people like me who do a great deal of reading and teaching, to get concepts mentally, to be able to speak them and read them. To know them through and through, in the world's great scriptures and in the best popular motivational speakers. But all of us must continually seek out, invite, and respond to the lived reality of mental knowledge. Love, after all, is not simply a nice thought, and the truth that each of us is a precious, perfect, whole, and complete child of God is not only a healing idea, but an experience that can bring us to a greater sense of knowing our value and belovedness.

When we know that, we are with God.

I will be sharing more of these thoughts and stories on Sunday. Leave a comment if you would like information about the service!

Rev. Sam Wilde