Today's Unshackled Echo was previously published on
June 15, 2013 as Wanted.
"You are wanted
To every broken heart, He stands with open arms
You are wanted
To every searching soul, look to the rising sun
If you're lonely, hurting, gone too far
To the outcast you come as you are
For you, you are wanted, you are wanted"
~ "Wanted" Dara Maclean
We were created to have relationship with God. What God wants most is to be close to and intimate with you and with me! His desire for relationship with us was so great He gave everything to make it possible. And when we find that relationship and understand how much God loves us and wants us we find the joy of a life worth living. Everything is better. Life becomes the emotional equivalent of riding off into the sunset together that makes romantic movies so wonderful and appealing to us.
There is such power and freedom in knowing that we are loved and wanted by God that the one who seeks to devour and destroy us would like nothing better than to make sure that we never come to that place. If we can be prevented from understanding the truth that God loves us and wants us in the depths of who we are then we can be robbed of what God wants for us and be made ineffective to help others find relationship with Him as well.
So it starts early, when we're young. For some, making us feel unwanted and unloved is easy. Broken and inadequate parents fail miserably, or worse, abuse and do damage. For those who are taken from biological parents in order to save them or who lose parents due to death and find themselves bouncing from place to place in the foster system the lie that we are unwanted becomes all too easy to believe as strongly as the concept of what goes up must come down. But that doesn't mean that those of us who had parents who loved us and cared for us are immune.
The lies come that we just don't fit in, that we do not and can not ever belong. We see all the ways that we fail to measure up to the hopes and desires of others as proof that we are worthless. The attitudes of peers can cause us to feel like outcasts. We take feelings of insecurity and shame and confusion and stuff them down, hiding them, and those secrets leave us feeling separated and misunderstood, failing to know the truth that others feel the same way and also just aren't talking about it. We buy the lie that nobody understands us. We are broken and defective and no one who ever really knew us, knew what we thought and felt inside, could ever want us, accept us or love us. And then comes the big lie, if no one else could, neither could God. Set up with the little lies we fall for the big con and go through life feeling unacceptable to and rejected by our Heavenly Father.
Oh what emptiness and pain that lie causes, and the things we do to try to cover up those feelings, to forget them, to find something else to take the place of our Father's love. And those things always fail and bring destruction. But there is hope, because the truth can always defeat lies and set us free. No matter if you felt alone in a crowd but were always surrounded by friends or never had a true friend, whether you had parents that loved you or know the pain of the orphan, if you've never been betrayed by love or if you never felt love at all, if you have ever felt the emptiness and loneliness of being unwanted you don't have to continue in that feeling.
God loves you. He wants you. He created you and declared you beautiful to Him and precious. He loves you as you are, not as you should be. He sees the mess inside your heart and head that you try to hide and cover up and accepts you anyway. Nothing that you tell yourself or that the enemy tells you makes you unlovable can keep God from loving you. And nothing you do or fail to do can make Him stop loving you. You are wanted. You are loved. The perfect parent who never fails, the most faithful friend, the lover who never strays of betrays knows everything there is to know about you and declares for all to hear, "I love you and want you with me." Hear the call to come to the security of His love. Accept His wooing, and in that relationship the emptiness is filled, the loneliness fades, the unworthiness and unvalued becomes a treasure.
Violinists around the world dream of owning a Stradivarious. They are rare, and when one does become available it costs a fortune. I read recently the story of why these violins are so precious and sound so much better than any that other makers construct. The secret is in the wood Stradivarious used. He lived in a small Italian harbor village in the 1700s, and since he was too poor to buy wood to make violins with, he pulled wood out of the polluted harbor. At that time the harbors were town dumps, smelly and filled with waste and garbage.
When experts analyzed the wood from Stradivarious violins they discovered that microbes in the contaminated water had eaten away the inside of the wood's cells. The only thing left of the cells was the superstructure. When a Strdivarious is played it's like an organ with thousands of sound chambers, each reverberating the sound of the bow moving across the strings.
No matter how polluted and worthless we may feel, God sees us as valuable. He knows that what we have done and what has been done to us has the potential, in His hands, of making us beautiful and unmatched instruments for His glory rather than the worthless driftwood we feel like and Satan would have us believe we are. We can stop looking at ourselves as trash, surrender to the Master, and allow Him to turn us into His special instruments. It's His life's work to take our broken and polluted lives and transform them into His masterpieces. That is His great desire. We are wanted and valued.
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