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.