During a 10-minute Love session, “Reckless Love” playing in my headphones I began to hear, “You always choose me. You always choose me.”
I began to see the lie that had set itself as truth in my mind; from one of my earliest childhood memories. The story of my adoption should have been one of how my Mom and Dad (adoptive parents, but my real and true Mom and Dad in every way) were searching for me and how my mom knew from the first moment that she saw a picture of me that I was the one she had been looking for. Instead, a single phrase in a brag book of my story took center-stage, “some Mommies and Daddies cannot take care of their babies”. As I heard the story of my birth family, it was shared with me that they had other children but couldn’t afford to take care of one more. Not a bad thing, simply a circumstance. And in the right light, which my Mom tried to share with me it is a story of love. “It was the ultimate example of love, to give you a much better life with someone who could provide you with all the things you need and love you.” But the lie was “They chose my brothers and sisters. They didn’t choose me.”
Here almost 51 years later, God floods my soul with “You always choose me! You always choose me.” The pain of what others call rejection, but I simply saw as “Everyone will always choose someone else or themselves OVER me. No one counts me worth going the hard road to reconciliation. They will always choose someone over me, even to the point of cutting me out of their lives.” And experience after experience reinforced this lie into a major belief system for me.
The result; I was always earning my position in other people’s lives. The easiest way to do that, “Always choose others, too.” If everyone else sees themselves as the most important, then empty myself, even to my own detriment, to take care of others; to put them first, to rescue, to deliver. Then maybe for that day, that month it will make me important enough to be kept in their life.
This cycle of “hustling for my worth” is exhausting. It continues until the people in my life are replaced with other people (simply by switching jobs, communities and seasons) and the cycle begins again at the starting line. This life has no finish line, never earning enough to rest and just be loved. Value and worth the price, but never recognizing that I am already fully and completely chosen before the foundations of the world.
The greatest thing about God is that His relationship with every person is always personal, one-on-one. And He will always choose you! His love and relationship are never at the expense of others and His love for me is NEVER OVER YOU. God will always go the distance for you. He will shut down every lie, have every conversation needed to build a connection with you and come after you again and again. God will always choose YOU!
It is time to stop the cycle and tear down the lie that you can not choose you. God chooses you and the world doesn’t fall apart. God chooses you. Time to cry out the weight of that responsibility of “doing just the right thing so others will love me” and rise up in the truth that you are already loved to the deepest part of your heart and mind, never to be left unchosen again. You are loved with a love that creates the best you ever… Beloved of God. Yes, it is time to Be-Loved.
