We had our conversation the same week that a whole mess of rejection hit the proverbial fan … and I didn’t want her to be alone in any of it.
“The Word who began the good work of restorying you, never quits that work until your story is forever good.“
I’m wrapping one hand around the warmth of a cup of mint tea and letting the stillness hold me on a damp autumn night, and this young woman, in the midst of everything, is still telling me of a brave man in her church who shared his story, how, along the way, he’d taken some painfully wrong turns, and not only lost his way, but lost some of his closest relationships — his marriage, his family — but The Way Himself had found him and returned him, restored him, and was doing the slow and miraculous work of restorying him, even now.
The Word who began the good work of restorying you, never quits that work until your story is forever good.
Jesus Himself proves it:
You can be despised and rejected by people, and still be beloved by God.
You can trust that no rejection gets to foil your calling, but rather can fuel it.
You can be rejected and neglected by them — and still be connected and protected by God.
“Where you feel deep rejection – is exactly where you are held by Christ’s deep affection.“
Her voice is soft… aching.
“It’s just, you know, sometimes, especially during worship — I can see it in his eyes — a sadness,’ her voice falls off for a moment. “Maybe sadness… a sadness for all that he’s lost…. and doesn’t feel like he can ever get back?”
“Yeah….” I nod slow, take a sip of my coffee… “Yeah… maybe the deepest comfort is knowing that no rejection can ever take away any of your sure security, because God still takes you. Once you’re a child of God… you are always a child of God and no one can erase you from the family of God when God etches your name right into the palm of His hand.”
And it strikes me, in the midst all the rejection, and all that we lose, and can’t ever regain, it still remains:
Like a child born to the King of Kings can’t ever lose his royalty, the child of God can’t ever lose his Beloved-child identity.
It cuts to the quick:
Isn’t this why it’s of paramount importance that we are spiritually and supernaturally “born again” — because every one born to the King of the universe, is born into a sonship, a kinship, a kingdom, that can never fade or fail, even every after everything falls away? Isn’t that the deepest comfort to every single one of us who have felt deeply alone?
Where you feel deep rejection – is exactly where you are held by Christ’s deep affection.
Jesus Himself proves it: You can be despised and rejected by people, and still be beloved by God.
Because, isn’t it true, what Thomas Watson writes in his larger exposition of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, and it means everything to each of us who feel the depths of their rejection and our own brokenness:
“If your waywardness has everyone else wanting to cast you away —- “Whom God adopts he never casts off; they are sons forever.”
Isn’t that true: Even when we are lost and get everything wrong — we can have a birthright that can never be lost.
Which is what Spurgeon claimed and is a real and present comfort: “A child of God may sin, but he is still a child of God. He may be under the rod, but he is not out of the family” (Spurgeon, Morning and Evening, 1865 edition).
A child may have the gift of the Father’s tender discipline, and still trust in never losing the Father’s loving relationship. Discipline never cancels relationship—- divine sonship, sacred kinship, is always permanent.
“No matter how we get lost on the journey, there’s unshakable security in our child-of-God identity. “
“Once in Christ, in Christ forever; nothing from His love can sever.” (Spurgeon sermon, 1886).
And that’s what I say this to the young woman telling me how she hurts for all kinds of rejection, and the sadness of a young man who’s lost so much on his circuitous, detouring way, and feels all the marks of indelible, painful scars:
No matter how we get lost on the journey, there’s unshakable security in our child-of-God identity.
The Spirit of God sustains and secures and keeps us, and only by His grace, we keep on keeping on and God keeps us and doesn’t cut us off as His Spirit makes a way for us to cut off distractions and keep following Him… Genuine believers surely can’t ever earn their salvation, but genuine believers live ever in the Spirit to surely bear real fruit, because if “anyone does not abide in (Him), he is thrown away like a branch” (John 15:10),” and maybe this is what C.S. Lewis meant when he encouraged us all on, “Christ said it was difficult for the rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. He meant that to follow Him is not something we do once and for. We must go on following Him every day” (Mere Christianity).
We must go on following Him every day. I’m still wrestling with how secure our belovedness is, how unbreakable is our bond of belonging to God, as a child of God, when, after a vulnerable conversation about living the cruciform tension of embracing grace and gripping truth, over a bowl of soup together by a window full of late autumn light, a friend and I slip into a play exploring the life and longings of the theologian, Henri Nouwen, a play titled — “The Beloved Son.”
As the actor, only a few feet away in this intimate space of a small church sanctuary, embodies the humanity of Henri Nouwen, and his wrestle with belonging and loss of relationship and ongoing struggle with identity, I can hear words Henri once wrote, and I had once underlined,
“Whatever name anyone else slaps on you, you’re held by your real name: Beloved. “
“Personally… I don’t often “feel” like a beloved child of God. But I know that is my most primal identity and I know that I must choose it… You are not what you do. You are not what you have… The truth… is that [you] are the chosen child of God, precious in God’s eyes, called the Beloved from all eternity, and held safe in an everlasting embrace” (Henri Nouwen).
And I brim and all the lost and rejected feel found:
Whatever name anyone else slaps on you, you’re held by your real name: Beloved.
Whatever name your mother gave you, your heavenly Father, who is Love, gave you Himself, and you’re always named after Him: Beloved.
However they choose to define you, God chooses you and says, “Forever Mine.”
We step out of the Henri Nouwen play and stand in the cool of an autumn night. I look up at the infinite canvas of stars overhead. Did Henri’s heart finally beat relaxed and reassured in the words of Julian of Norwich:
“God loved us before He made us; and His love has never diminished and never shall…. All shall be well… for the love in which He made us has no beginning and this love is our true source.”
“Christ is yours, and you are Christ’s, so regardless of what goes wrong or awry, belovedness is always your birthright.“
It’s the morning after the tender Henri Nouwen play, as the dark autumn sky gives way to the first wet snow, when our youngest daughter, adopted and grafted into our family with her own sure identity as our beloved child, she asks me at the kitchen counter, as I’m tipping the long spout kettle over a waiting mug, if she can have a cup of tea with me too.
And as I smile and nod yes, she hands me her own cup and saucer, the one I’d given her for her birthday. The one engraved with Aslan, and a lamp post sculpted right into the cup, and there it is, below the cup, one line etched into the rim of the saucer:
“Once a queen in Narnia…. Always a queen in Narnia…”
Once His, always His…
Christ is yours, and you are Christ’s, so regardless of what goes wrong or awry, belovedness is always your birthright.
I pour her cup right full.
The steam rises like a returning, like a coming home to belonging.
How do you find real belonging?
How do you find yourself loved beyond imaginging? How do you navigate losses and find the way through painful parts of your story …. and lean into the life you’ve always dreamed of — and trust that it’s not too late for your life to be made into a masterpiece of art?
What does it powerfully look like to have a new way of life, a new way of being that rests fully in the unwavering, unshakeable, hesed-lovingkind ways of God — especially now?
