You Are Worthy of Love
I was eleven years old when my family, as I knew it anyway, fell apart. It was one night that everything changed, and like so many of us who have lived through tragic experiences, I can remember the finest of details, even though it happened 24 years ago. My father’s affair had been revealed, and for the next few years, I was a young boy experiencing all the trauma that came along with it.
I overheard more verbal fights than I can count, watched my father pack his belongings up and drive away. I was in courtrooms and lawyers’ offices during custody battles, and lived through the hell of meeting and having to get along with the person with whom my father had the affair. All the while trying to be supportive to my eight and five-year-old brothers.
I went to counseling during that time, and had a lot of adult mentors in my life who were saying things like, “you know this isn’t your fault, right?” and “you need to talk about what you are feeling.” I would answer them with confidence, “I know it is not my fault” and would dutifully talk about my feelings with those who would listen. But at the same time, I felt that I needed to fulfill a role. When I was 11 I felt the responsibility of being the caretaker for my two young brothers. My mom, now a single mother, with no child support coming in yet, took to working 14 to 16 hour days all the while grieving the end of her marriage, and the betrayal she experienced.
The role I stepped into was the need to be strong. To be the one who was put together and capable. No one told me I needed to do that. I just did. And so, I began answering questions like, “how are you doing with all of this” with, “It doesn’t bother me anymore, I just want to move on.” This was partly true, I did want to move on, but it was also a need to communicate strength and resilience to those whom I was supporting.
Of course, now that I am 24 years removed from that experience, I can see the coping mechanisms and the way in which my newly accepted role set me up for who I am today. I am also beginning to truly see the lasting impacts my father’s painful departure from my family had on me at such a young age.
And the main lasting impact is easily summed up like this, “people you love can leave your life, so you must do all you can to not make them want to leave.”
For the last 24 years, I have internalized that way of looking at relationships. To this day I feel that I am constantly letting people down. I feel that I am one mistake away from anyone and everyone packing up their belongings and leaving my life.
During this time in my life, I became newly involved in the church and probably heard “God loves you no matter what” hundreds of times. And yet I can say that I never once heard that line and believed it. It seemed like something you just say in Church. It was hard to believe because of the mixed messaging. “God will always love you” but you when you sin he is mad at you, and that is why you need Jesus. Like all my other relationships at the time, God always seemed ready to pack his bags.
You can see how easily I equated “God the Father” image with that of the delicate and broken relationship with my own father.
And while I internalized the fed line from those adult mentors that my parent’s separation was not my fault, I think the core lesson was that the love bond with my father was not enough to keep him from ruining our relationship. I wasn’t enough. And the same was for God the Father, I was sinful. I wasn’t good enough to be loved as I was.
And so most of my life trajectory has been this internalized fear that my not being enough for people is going to mean I lose people whom I love.
How this manifests itself on a daily basis is that dozens upon dozens of people visit my brain throughout the day, and as each of them comes to mind I worry that I have not done enough to sustain that relationship. The negative self-talk rushes in listing my failures. It all comes from a deep sense of my inadequacy.
I think the challenge that has been laid in front of me now, is to trust and to see with my own eyes that everything is loved by God. I have to wrestle with my past experience in the Church, where it was clear that people, being their truest selves, were outside the perimeters of God’s love. That God would only love them should they change their sexuality, or worship our God. Even if I carried the concept of God’s unconditional love in my brain, it could not be felt in my heart so long as I knew that God’s love and care were not truly being extended to everyone.
As Richard Rohr says, “If God chooses and doles out their care, we are always insecure and unsure we are among the lucky recipients. But once we become aware of the generous, creative Presence that exists in all things natural, we can receive it as the inner Source of all dignity and worthiness. Dignity is not doled out to the worthy. It grounds the inherent worthiness of things in their very nature and existence.”
Knowing this kind of elemental love, within myself feels like it requires some serious practice. If I am able to move into this territory of deep trust that is that I am worthy of love apart from my exasperating efforts to make it true, I can imagine the liberation I would feel. This is not to say that relationships do not require attention and dedication, but they also do not require obsession and constant self-flagellation and criticism.
I don’t doubt that there are others here this morning who feel similarly to me. I think we all know the feeling of questioning our belonging, and constantly working to prove our worthiness and our place. To the people in this space who have heard directly from so-called preachers of the gospel that you are unworthy of God’s love, I want to say that I am so, so, so sorry and that they were wrong. You are loved. Even when your fellow humans tell you otherwise, I want to join you in the journey of knowing, at our core, that we are worthy of love.
There isn’t any one scripture that I want to highlight here to drive home this point. We only need to hold the entire life of Jesus in our view to know that Jesus did not withhold his love for any person based upon any specific status or criteria. Jesus did not ask for anyone’s credentials before healing them. Jesus modeled and looked at every person he came across with elemental compassion.
To close out my message I want to share a video. It is from one of my favorite musicians David Bazan. David grew up in the Christian Church specifically within fundamentalist circles, and many of his songs are about his past. I think David wrote this song for all the people who have been told they are unworthy of love. In the video, David’s daughter is running down a street and David’s face breaks in with tear-filled eyes as he sings to her. The last two lines of the song are “You are worthy of love.”
Some queries:
When was a time in your life where you knew, at your core, that you were deeply and truly loved beyond your efforts to make that true?
When was a time in your life where you doubted that you were worthy of love and encountered someone or something that reminded you of your worthiness. What was that experience like? Who or what did that for you?
Imagine yourself free from the burden of negative self-talk, and worries about your belovedness, what can you imagine is possible for you in that spacious place? What is something you might be able to do that you have never felt free enough to do before?