You’re the One
You’re the One
In ways that only God can, He redeems our most broken places and uses them for His glory, creating echoes of His gospel in the stories of our lives. One of the most significant ways God did this for me was through the final months of my Father’s life.
It never ceases to amaze me how God gives us glimpses of the gospel in the stories of our lives. He pours His grace into the dark and broken places of our experiences until our most painful wounds provide the greatest opportunity to display His glory. It has taken me thirty years of walking with the Lord to learn to respond to rejection in a healthy way. As a child, even the slightest hint of disapproval could send me spiraling into soul-crushing despair. As I looked to my family for security and affirmation, I received mixed messages of acceptance and rejection. I was left confused and uncertain if I was worthy of love. My upbringing felt like a perpetual game of “one-two-three-under” that my Dad played with me when teaching me to swim. On every count of three he would dunk me under the water whether I was ready or not. No matter how much I would cry, protest, or gasp for air, another dunk would follow after each count of three. Like the three second reprieve when I was able to catch my breath, there were happy moments in my childhood, but they were always followed by the dreaded dunk that would send me gasping for the love and approval I desperately needed to survive.
I can’t recall a time when I didn’t long for my Father’s approval. Every decision I made as an adolescent and young adult was influenced by this elusive pursuit. What would my dad think? Would my decision cause him to give or withhold his love? I lived my life under the shadow of his fickle affection; never sure if I would be scorched by his scorn or shaded by his comfort. When he loved, he loved so well, yet when he rejected me, he knew just what to say to vaporize any measure of confidence I managed to develop. I know he didn’t mean to. He had his own brokenness to contend with, and I know he did the best he could with what he had to work with. In spite of the emotional, verbal, and at times physical abuse I endured from him, I honestly had a deep love and respect for my Dad. He sincerely tried to be a good Father. Like the Bible says, “love covers a multitude of sins”. (1 Peter 4:8) Intertwined with my pain were threads of redemptive moments that have woven a tapestry of dark shades and bright; beauty and sorrow.
As I headed into my young adult years I was a mixed bag of emotions. I could be confident and ambitious one day, and curled up in a puddle of self-loathing the next. Somehow, in spite of my Pandora’s Box of emotions, God relentlessly pursued me with His love. In hindsight I can see evidence of His fingerprints all over my life. From the Christian family that lived across the street from me when I was five years old, to multiple Christians God strategically placed in my life throughout my teen and young adult years, I was never out of God’s reach. He waited for the perfect moment to draw me to Himself; a point when He knew I had exhausted all other vain attempts to find love and acceptance apart from Him. At twenty years old, after my third move and college transfer, I found myself sitting in a church service with tears streaming down my face. The pastor explained that God’s grace was something I could never earn or deserve - it was unmerited favor. Something inside of me clicked. His words overcame my hesitations and evaporated my fear of rejection. If I could do nothing to earn or deserve God’s love, then it only made sense that I could do nothing to lose it. This was the guarantee I desperately needed; the assurance that my salvation depended solely and completely on the finished and sufficient work of Christ. My ability or inability to please Him was not a factor. In that moment, I ran to Jesus and never turned back.
There were things about me that the Lord changed instantly and things that took time for me to heal and grow through. There are areas of my life He continually prunes, shapes, and matures, assuring me that He who began a good work in me will be faithful to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus. (Philippians 1:6) It’s a process, but I am learning to trust Jesus with the most vulnerable broken parts of my soul. Piece by piece He puts me back together in ways I never imagined possible. While my life experience taught me to expect rejection, God is teaching me that I am fully accepted as His beloved. Some people can hear that they are God’s beloved and receive it with joy, but when I hear I am God’s beloved my flesh shrinks back to the little girl who grew up convinced that she was unlovable. It takes a deep guttural level of faith for me to believe that God loves me. Sometimes I think that’s exactly where He wants me to be - in a posture of complete reliance upon Him to give me a supernatural understanding of His love. When I attempt to ascertain it with my own limited capacity, my dysfunction inevitably distorts it into something it is not. I need the prayer that Paul prayed for the Ephesians,
“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of His glory He may grant you to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith - that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
- Ephesians 3:14-19
This incomprehensible love of God was put on full display through the gospel. While we were enemies of God and dead in our trespasses and sins, He sent His Son to live a life we couldn’t live, to pay a price we couldn’t pay, so we could, by faith, receive a gift we could never earn or deserve. This is a design for redemption that no human being could ever contrive. It is motivated by a divine, unworldly kind of love. Jesus didn’t wait for His beloved to be lovely, but instead gave Himself up for the most unworthy of benefactors…
“For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person - though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die - but God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” - Romans 5:6-8
In ways that only God can, He redeems our most broken places and uses them for His glory, creating echoes of His gospel in the stories of our lives. One of the most significant ways God did this for me was through the final months of my Father’s life.
My Dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at 50 years old. In the years that followed his diagnosis, his fourth marriage dissolved and my older brother tragically and unexpectedly passed away. This left me as my Father’s designated Power of Attorney. Eventually he could no longer be cared for in his two-story home that lacked an accessible bathroom, so my husband and I made the decision to sell his house and move him to live with us so we could oversee his care. On the day I had to tell him that we were selling his home and moving him to live with us, I was terrified. I had suggested this option in the past and he was adamantly opposed to the idea. His condition had significantly declined since the first time I mentioned it, so I had no idea how he would respond this time around. My heart was pounding and I felt gripped by anxiety as I pulled into his driveway. When I entered the house he was standing in the kitchen and in the moments that followed God gave me the sweetest gift I could have ever imagined.
He was barely able to speak in full sentences at the time, but I’ll never forget the words he spoke to me. It took a moment for him to register who I was when he first saw me, then his face lit up with delight. He said, “There you are!” Pointing at me with ecstatic joy he repeated, “There you are!” He went on to say, “You’re the one! You’re the one I love more than anyone else in the whole wide world!” Alzheimer’s had the opposite effect on my dad than it does on most people. Instead of becoming ornery and cantankerous, my dad became kind and cooperative. When I told him about my plan to sell his home and move him in with us, he replied, “I think that’s a real good idea.” He never once got angry about the change in his environment. He was appreciative of everything we did for him everyday.
The Lord gave us six precious months with my father before he took his last breath on this earth. Even in his final hours he still managed to mouth the words “I love you” to me. God’s intentionality in giving me this gift of healing closure with my dad was not lost on me. I still weep tears of joy when I reflect on these moments. I’m not only overwhelmed by the realization that my dad always loved me - even when I didn’t always perceive that as a child - but I also realize that God used my earthly father to speak the gospel of my Heavenly Father to my heart.
When my dad said, “you’re the one I love more than anyone else in the whole wide world”, it was as if God was quickening my spirit, causing me to realize that’s how He - my Heavenly Father - feels about me. Before the foundations of the earth, He chose me. (Ephesians 1:4) Not because of anything good or bad I would do, but because of Him who calls. (Romans 9:11) And if you have put your faith in Jesus, the same is true of you. You’re the one! You’re the one He foreknew, predestined, called, justified, and glorified. (Romans 8:29-30) This is the beauty and magnificence of the gospel.
