Worth It

I feel like I'm being forced to accept the real world. A world that is lost, sick, and horribly messed up. I feel like my normal is what the world see and thinks, "Nice thoughts kid. You are so sheltered". Which is reality? Is my somewhat safe, mostly regular world reality, or is the world really a place there everything is up for grabs and everything has been abused? I feel like I'm blind to all of the world's awful things and that one day the world is going to shock me into a shell and I won't be able to help it.

I'm not oblivious to the world's mess-up-ed-ness though. I get that it's all not okay. I've been hurt. I know pain. And the world does too. Every single person on earth has or will be hurt sometime during their lives. But I have Hope. Sure the world is hurting, but I know a healer. Yes the world can be perverted, but I have someone who loved the world as if it was worth dying for. Jesus did not die for us so that our world could continue being broken in sin. Jesus died for us so that we could help heal our world.

After all we are called to create culture; not to follow it (quote Connie Jakab, =) http://culturerebel.com/). I have been given such big tools to help my world with. My story proves it. In everything I have gone through God has been there. In every single step of the way Jesus was there. God loves me even when I don't love me. God has carried me every step of the way to get to where I am and he's going to carry me to where he wants me to be.

And you know whats part of that getting to where God wants us to be? I believe that God wants to get us to the place where we are HEALED.

God wants us to be able to live in the place where we are confident, secure, courageous, loved and most of all, healed.

"Love can forbear, and Love can forgive...but Love can never be reconciled to an unlovely object...He can never therefore be reconciled to your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be reconciled to your person, because that may be restored."
-Traherne. Centuries of Meditation, II, 30. (I read it in C.S. Lewis' Problem of Pain).

That is what I am trying to say! God wants us to be healed and restored. He loves us so much that to leave us in our present state would be to break his heart. God wants the best for us. And this is where I find a shred of beauty in mankind's mess. God is loving on us and chasing after us so fervrently. He is going to the farthest possible extent that he can in order to bless us. He thinks that despite the mess WE ARE WORTH IT. And if God thinks that way about me, I'm willing to treat everyone else I see like they are worth it too.

Not that we loved God, But that He loved us.

"If the world exists not chiefly that we may love God but that God may love us, yet that very fact, on a deeper level, is so for our sakes. If he who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed."
                                                     C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

This really astounds me. I love how it's giving me greater insight into just how much God loves us. He loves us enough to give us our freedon so that he can woo us and call us to him. He choose to need us because the only way we could really even call needing God was for him to choose to need us so that he may be in reach. It's like the verse, "This is love; not that we loved God, but that he loved us" (1 John 4:10). The only way we could possibly dare to love God was if he came down and showed us how to love him. We all need God like the very air we breathe but we never knew how to need God unless he demonstrated it first.

God choose to want us and then he placed this infathomable need for God into us. There must be a reason why we all know that our earth is not how it should be. There is a reason as to why we know that something is wrong in our societies, in our pain, in our suffering. Our souls know the perfection that God orignally made for us. We have never seen it, but we know it. God has told our souls what we really want because it's his desire for us as well. God made it so that he would want us and by doing that, we were able to grasp what our wildest dreams couldn't contain. That we could dare to want God and that his perfection would want us back.