I feel like we are in the throws of a beautiful, yet emotionally complicated season…
… a season of celebration coupled with a season of comparison…
We celebrate loved ones and friends who have accomplished much throughout this school year, who are graduating, who are starting new adventures…
But inevitably we also have pangs of jealousy and disquiet as we compare our best moments with theirs.
Or is that just me?
I know I sit down every year around this time and wonder what I could have done better this year for my children, for myself, and even for God.
I scroll past others’ photos of wonderful moments of celebration and wonder if I didn’t pay enough attention to the real life moments I was a part of – did I do enough for them? did I spend enough time making them special? did I even adequately capture them before they slipped away?
Lately, however, the blessing of having a bunch of conversations with people about what it means to be loved as you are has quelled this surge in me of jealousy and disquiet.
I’ve been able to hear over and over again from people all over that there is one who is always celebrating me for being me.
There is one who looks at me with such love that if I pause all my jealousy and all my disquiet and all my comparison to just bask in it – joy will inevitably seep in.
There are many quotes from Greg Boyle that I love about how God loves us. The line before this one says: “The God, who is greater than God, has only one thing on Her mind, and that is to drop, endlessly, rose petals on our heads.”
… to drop endlessly rose petals on our head…
Wow.
This is what I am coming to know more each conversation that I have:
God will it say again and again until we not only hear it… but know it in our bones…
We. Are. Loved.
As. We. Are.
No. Matter. What.
… and no season will ever change that.
(If you’d like to listen to more about the theme of being loved as you are, check out Loved As You Are: An Ignatian Podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts)
