God wants You!
I think it’s safe to say that we’ve all wanted something we couldn’t have.
Oct 10, 2014

By Anne Marie Schlueter
I think it’s safe to say that we’ve all wanted something we couldn’t have.
For me, it’s the driver’s license my parents want me to wait until I’m eighteen to obtain. Even though they’ve rejected my request for a driver’s license certainly does not mean that I stopped wanting one.
God’s kind of like us in that way. No, he never rejects us; sometimes it may seem like it, but He really is just asking us to wait for something better. But God is constantly pouring out His unconditional love upon us during every single part of our day, even when He’s the last thing on our minds.
And yet… we reject Him continually. We reject an all-loving God who was abandoned, hard-core beaten, and ultimately died for us. Sometimes I wonder if I reject Him more than I accept Him.
Sure, we reject Him in the things we say and do. We reject Him by gossiping, by judging others, even by rejecting other people. Even though I struggle with these things, I’ve come to realize that I’ve been rejecting God in a way that has nothing to do (directly) with other people.
I reject God… because I reject myself.
There are some parts of myself I’m not proud of. There are things I’ve said and done that make me cringe. Times I haven’t stood up for someone who I knew I should have, times I’ve been a part of gossip, or worse, have started it. Times I’ve cut people off just because the friendship became tough. These and so many, many more.
When I turned fifteen, we moved away from my life-long hometown. During the days following the move, a rush of memories flooded back to me, and not all of them were positive. Regret consumed me and I couldn’t handle it.
I figured that I had messed up so many times, there was no way I could ever be the person God wanted me to be. I continued to just push these uncomfortable parts of myself deep down, but they would reappear because I just kept making the same mistakes. When I would think about them, I would literally get the urge to hide. From myself and from God. It was like I was begging Him to turn His back to me for just a second because I was so ashamed.
One day, though, I was listening to the song “How He Loves.” And even though I’ve heard it a million times, I believe the Holy Spirit used the song to tell me something.
God wants me. He wants to encounter me just as He wants me to encounter Him. And you know what?
He wants to encounter EVERY SINGLE PART OF US. Not just the hour-on-Sunday part, not just the youth group part. As important as these parts of us are to give to God, He is not satisfied with only what we view as the “best” parts of us. He wants the messy, broken, fallen down parts of us.
And, deep down, these are the parts we long to give Him.
We NEED to give Him the shame. We need to give Him the relationships that we totally messed up in. We need to give Him the part of us that feels empty, that doubts. We need to give Him the guilt we carry on our backs. We need to give Him the dumb things we’ve said that continue to haunt us. He wants it, He wants all of us… He wants you.
Giving it to God isn’t accepting the sin in our lives as something that is impossible to stop doing. No way. But it is only through admitting these things to God, only by letting them out through the beautiful Sacrament of Confession, can we ever hope to remove the sin from our lives. God doesn’t want us to remain guilty, constantly cringing at the past and trying to hide; He wants us to come away with Him, come into the light. He will never relent. He will never stop fighting until He has every single part of us.
No matter how many times we reject Him, He will never stop wanting us. He can do the most beautiful things with our crazy human mess-ups once we give in to Him.
Source: LifeTeen
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