loved anyway

Hooray for the internet...and having it at the place I live again. It's been almost a year since I've had that, and I'm realizing how much I've missed it. I've decided it's my valid excuse for not blogging in 300 years--it's hard for me to write these when I can't immediately post when I'm in a "blog writing mood."

This weekend I went to Wisconsin to visit my family and go to my little sister's bridal shower--it was fun, but the drive home felt more lonely than it's ever felt before. Now, I've never considered myself one to get homesick; I was always the kid who loved overnights, camp, missions trips...I was ready for anything, and missing home was at the bottom of my list. There were too many adventures to have to waste energy on homesickness. But now...

Now that that I've graduated, home seems like even more elusive than it did in college. Maybe it's that my expectations were that the temporary feeling of college would end upon graduation, that life would feel more solid when I put my cap and tassel into storage. It's strange for me to feel more homesick now than I ever did as a college freshman--in my 4 hour drive back to my Twin Cities apartment (that I'll leave again in 4 1/2 months), I wonder what it would be like to be able to hang out with my siblings whenever I wanted, to come home to family, to have a place that I know I'll be at longer than the time it takes to become familiar before I have to move again.

I thought about something I'd read this week in Don Miller's In Search of God Knows What. He talks about how Jesus had no fear of intimacy and wonders, "if the greatest desire of man is to be known, and loved anyway." I think he's right--and I don't know if I had ever thought about it along those lines. I would have said that we all desire to be loved--but the most secure sense of love is that in which we feel truly known, and yet, still loved inspite of all our brokenness. It's family love. My family may not know everything about me, but they've seen my worst--when I'm moody, angry, annoying, nagging, sobbing, lost control... They know the flaws in me, even the ones you'll only notice by getting up close and staring for a while. But I'd never question whether they'd still be there; they're my family, and they'll never quit being it. There's security in that, that feeling of family, that sense of home.

It makes me marvel at the fact that it is one of the most frequent metaphors God uses to describe our relationship with him. We are his children; he is our Father; it's family. In Christ, we are known, and loved anyway.