Experiencing God's Love in an Identity Crisis
Dorothy, 1st Congregation
Dorothy
When I was growing up, I knew of God but I can’t say that I knew Him although I thought I did. To me, the love of God was a vague hazy notion. I mischaracterised God’s love for me as tolerance and perhaps mild enjoyment when I was particularly nice or charitable, and I measured God’s love for me by the imperfect love of man—a love that is measured by the value or worth that I could bring to each of my relationships.
When I started working in 2018, I found work overwhelming at times. I was insecure about the salary I was drawing compared to my peers, the difficulty of my work and how far or how fast I was progressing in my career. I did not enjoy what I was doing, but I felt like I had to. I didn’t have a career progression plan, but it seemed like I should have one. I was simultaneously envious of the lives of others but unwilling to expend more energy into furthering my career. I was facing an identity crisis of sorts - I thought my worth to be tied up in the secular markers of success like my career but I increasingly felt that these achievements were hollow and meaningless. Above all, I grew tired of chasing these things that I didn’t want, but that I thought I wanted.
Psalm 16 verse 11 says: “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore”, and in 2020, that’s exactly what God did for me. He made Himself known to me at a time when it wouldn’t have crossed my mind to seek Him out. I had been having these feelings about work for quite some time, and on a particularly bad day, I asked a close friend who I knew attended RHC if I could attend his CG. I didn’t know what prompted me to reach out then - looking back, I believe that the Holy Spirit was at work, convicting me of my need for God, even if I didn’t know it yet. At a time when I thought that I needed to have value to be loved, God sought me out and told me that I had nothing to offer Him, not my intellect or anything that I could do for Him, but that He still loved me because I am His.
I had rejected God’s love, having thought that I could be self-sufficient and to this day I am still prone to self-reliance and pride. But the promise of Jesus Christ is that through His death and resurrection, I can draw near to the Father as I am, still a sinner mired in pride. Because of the work of Christ, I know that my pride is no longer counted against me, and my material achievements no longer counted in my favour. What a wonderful encouragement to know that there is no obstacle or hurdle to cross to approach God, other than to go to Him. To end, I’d like to borrow Timothy Keller’s words: “The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”