My testimony

I wrote this a few months after becoming a Christian:

We all have a pretty solid idea that, in the real world, love is not enough. Yeah, sure, “Love conquers all”, “All you need is love”, “Love makes the world go ‘round” and all that nice kind of stuff is all very nice, and it’s nice to think in these terms, but let’s get real here. As nice as love is, it doesn’t really change everything and fix everything. We can’t trust it to answer all our problems. We need practical solutions.
   But what if it could? What if, somehow, it was a practical solution? Humor me here for a minute. What would that kind of love look like? It couldn’t be on the same magnitude as the love in most of our relationships, or even be of the same type; many of them seem to cause far more heartbreak and trouble than they help.
   Those loves are imperfect; it would have to be a perfect love that could change the world, and us. And with all the crap that’s in the world and in us, it would have to be unconditional, or it would never permit itself to reach us. It would have to be like the love that a parent has for their child, except infinitely deeper and infinitely more perfect and true and consistent.
   Can such a love exist as more than a nice abstraction? I’ve been learning things, looking at some things in a different way, and actually even having experiences that are leading me to believe that it just might. I can’t prove to you that is exists, any more than you can prove to me that it doesn’t. But I can share what experiences I’ve had, if it would help.
   God as I understood Him growing up was always either no help (too distant and uninvolved), or made me feel worse (guilt and shame for my inadequacies). That God loved me was a nice abstraction, but was of little comfort and certainly wasn’t life-changing. That He really would and could love with a love that was perfect and unconditional and personal did not even cross my mind.
   I’ve only just begun to know God as the giver of perfect, unconditional love, and my life has already changed so much, and every bit for the better. I used to loathe myself, and now for the first time in a very long time, I feel as though I am a worthwhile human being, and a good person, and a loveable person. The constant weight of never-good-enough has been replaced with a happiness I never dreamed I could ever have. Rather than doing what’s right out of a sense of obligation and guilt, I’m finding myself doing it out of joy, as if it is the most natural thing in the world. I’m also no longer doing things to try to prove my worth, or to not be a complete waste of oxygen, like I was trying to before, but simply out of love. And my performance hasn’t deteriorated; I’m far more able to be the person I want to be than before. Far from perfect; I have a long way to go. But my heavy heart gets lighter and lighter the more God’s love works in it. And it has been a practical solution for me, far more effective than anything ever before.
   Maybe love doesn’t cut the mustard in coping with reality, but my experience has been that nothing else but love does. Who knows; you may find the same.