I admit being in a lot of emotional pain. A pain derived from certain incidents in life. This pain though frequent, is always unexpected. I have made progress in getting over it. But at its core lay a fundamental impulse that cannot be ignored. To the extent of denying my humanity if I choose to rid myself of it.
(Yes, I know. Some of you reading this have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s okay, but I do hope you understand what I’m going to share now.)
Like most teenagers, I discovered rejection. I found it in the form of a girl who did not accept me though I loved her dearly. You can guess by now that my story(at least for now) did not end with a “happily ever after”. It was traumatic to say the least. While working through the pain, I remember asking God what did He want to teach me through all this. I remember distinctively the impression He gave me,
“This is how I feel,…”
It wasn’t until a few months later that I figured out why He decided to show me a fraction of His pain. Because I had asked for it. Faithfully for a few years during secondary school I asked God to show me how He felt. But that’s beside the point.
What ensued the revelation of His feelings(in a lesser intensity), was devastating and alarming. Devastating because I never thought He’d answer my question with a question. I asked:
“I love her, I want her. Why doesn’t she want me?”
To which He responded,
“I love you, I want you. Why won’t you want Me?”
And the part that alarmed me, was how numb I felt. I was not convicted of the fact that I had rejected Him when I sought my own ways. That because I was comfortable with my lifestyle, I had stopped seeking Him and rejected Life.
But over the course of time, I realised what the astounding revelation actually implied. It wasn’t a fiery arrow of conviction, it was a fragile letter of confession, that He wants me. It is already difficult to grasp the concept of a God who LOVES me, yet here He is telling me that He WANTS me. 1 John 4:8 says that God is love. In a rather naive and subtle way, we often mistake that God saving humankind is sort of His duty and perhaps it was just a parade of His might and glorious presence compared to our feeble existence. Yet at the core of the Bible, the message that Jesus so embodied was this, :
“I love you, and more than that I want you.”
Our triumphant God who split the Red Sea, who made the earth, who knows all things, who planned a universe, this wondrous entity, wants me. And you. Humans invented the Xbox and the Playstation long after the event of creation, but God was probably playing Pong with the angels using Jupiter as the ball even before He made earth! And this same God, WANTS, TO, HANG, OUT, WITH, US!! HE DESIRES US!
There are many instances where the Bible explicitly states God’s love. But one of clearest is in the wrongly titled parable: The Parable of the Prodigal Son. As Ryan pointed out to me, it should be: The Parable of the Ever-loving Father. God longs for us. If we’re lost, we are assured by His own words that He is more than willing to receive us. If we are already with Him, we are assured that He will give nothing less than all He has. Not just because He is our Father, not just because He loves us. More than that, because He wants to, because He wants us.
He wants me.
He wants you.