While We Were Still a Mess

Do you know the hardest thing in all the world to believe?

It is this. That someone could love you right now, this very minute, with the mess still on your hands, before you have cleaned up a single bit of it.

A long time ago, a man named Paul wrote a letter to people who were learning to follow Jesus. They were people just like you. People who sometimes did wrong things. People who wondered, deep down, Could God really want me? Shouldn't I get good first?

So Paul picked up his pen, and here is the heartbeat of what he wrote to them.

Think about it, he said. If someone is very good and kind, well, maybe, just maybe, somebody brave might be willing to die for a person like that.

God did something far more surprising than that.

While we were still weak. While we were still turned away. While we were still a mess, with our backs to God and our arms folded tight, Jesus came. And Jesus laid down his life for us.

He did not stand at the door tapping his foot, waiting for us to tidy ourselves up. He never once said, "Come back when you're better." He came out into the dark to find us while we were still far off. That is the part Paul wanted them to feel all the way down to their toes, and the part he wanted you to feel too.

This is how God shows what is inside him. He is love, all the way through, and love is what came looking.

Have you ever spilled something and tried to hide it before anyone saw?

Oh, little one. God loved you while you were still hiding. He loved you with the spill still spreading across the floor. He loved you so much that he sent Jesus straight into the worst of it, to bring you home.

Then Paul went further.

If God already loved us when we were turned away, think how safe we are now that he has pulled us close. If he gave his own Son for us when we were strangers, he is not going to let go of us now that we are his children.

You do not have to earn your way to the table. The table was set for you while you were still a mess. The love came running before you ever asked.

He loved you first. He loved you already.

Paul stopped and let the ink dry. There was more he wanted to tell them, about a whole aching world waiting for God to mend it, and further on in the same letter he would write that too. But this had to come first: God came out to get you while your hands were still dirty, and he is not turning back now.