When Life Gets Sketchy
As I was reading Henri Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved, I felt as if the Holy Spirit wanted me to share a particular passage with someone. After describing the voice of God calling Jesus “beloved” at baptism (Matt. 3:16-17), Nouwen says to his friend, “Fred, all I want to say to you is 'You are the Beloved,' and all I hope is that you can hear these words as spoken to you with all the tenderness and force that love can hold. My only desire is to make these words reverberate in every corner of your being–'You are the Beloved.'”
After several hours of no response, my friend finally wrote back a simple question: “How can you be certain?”
Maybe that’s the best and most important question my friend could have asked. How can you know that I am a Beloved child of God?
I wonder how you would respond to such a question.
Life is full of in-between spaces, where we find ourselves not quite here or there. The lines of life become sketchy, incomplete, unfinished, and it is up to us to navigate reality and find our story in it. On my own, it becomes difficult for me to be sure that I am beloved of God. I need reminders. Scripture is surely a place to turn, but Scripture can feel so far away and impersonal sometimes. Like, it was written for everyone, sure, but was it written for me? How am I made in the image of God? How am I someone for whom Christ died? How am I called a child of God? What makes me so special that God would adopt me as God’s own?
God who spoke the world into being gives us a powerful gift in words. “With it [the tongue] we both bless the Lord and Father and curse human beings made in God’s likeness. Blessing and cursing come from the same mouth. My brothers and sisters, it just shouldn’t be this way!” (James 3:9-10). We have the power with our words to remind one another, “You are made in God’s likeness. You are beloved.” We have the power with our words to bless. And that blessing makes a real difference.
You see, my best friend is the one who gave me the book in the first place. He saw that I needed to be reminded that I am beloved, and he spoke those words of blessing over me. The lines of my life were messy and unfinished, and that’s a hard place to be for a long time. So blessing was spoken into my life. And I immediately felt the Holy Spirit at work within me, empowering me to speak that same blessing into the life of another.
That is how I can be certain that I am beloved. That my questioning friend is beloved. That you are beloved. There is a very real sense in which our God-likeness is imbued with the power of blessing. Even when we cannot be present with each other physically, we have the power of words to text, call, write, speak blessedness and belovedness into the lives of God’s children everywhere.
Sometimes the greatest blessing is when my friends, who know I’m down, still choose to joke with me and treat me like I’m, well, normal. Sometimes the greatest blessing is when my friends share their own pain and struggles with me despite knowing I’m in a dark place myself. You see, they’re empowering me to bless them. They’re entrusting me to bless them. And we hold each other in blessing.