Author Margot Starbuck asks the salient question, “What if God receives me exactly as I am?” Sit with that a moment. Now ask yourself, “How has my culture, my friends, my family, or my significant others communicated to me that I need to be different than who I am?” There’s some dissonance between those two questions isn’t there?

Starbuck writes:

The earliest faces in our lives have the power to reflect the truth about who we are or to reflect a lie. In Jesus’s experiences, his Father whispered, “This is my son, the Beloved, with whom I am well  pleased,” and the deceiver hissed something along the lines of, “You’re not really who God says you are.”

Many of us have repeatedly been lied to about who we are. All of our parents have fallen short of God’s job description. They have wounded and sometimes even crippled us leaving us desperate for affirmation and acceptance. Additionally, we live in a culture that is empowered to criticize. We tear down, critique, rate, make suggestions for how something (or someone) might be better. It’s no surprise that we overlay those disapproving faces on God and assume He is no different.

We must work to discover the truth of who God actually is and how profoundly he love us before we can detox from the poisons we’ve ingested over the course of our lives. Starbuck gets this and points us in the right direction.

“Aware or unaware, many of us have assigned to God the expressions we’ve gleaned from other faces. Some of these match what we know to be true of the Father of Jesus. Many, however–filled with disappointment or heartless judgment–bear no resemblance to the One whose gracious, steadfast love never fails. As we begin to notice these misleading facades, we can at least exchange the false for the true.”

She probes under the surface, asking, “How do our early perceptions of God influence who we think He is?” We must wrestle with this if we are in fact to move into a deeper, truer understanding of the Trinity. Once we grasp the prodigality of God’s love, we can wake up in it, lean on it in the midst of our own disappointments and grief, and draw from it so that we can love others. Such knowledge is in fact a game changer.

I asked Margot what it felt like to know that she had a God who loved her unconditionally. She responded:

“It’s delicious. In college I could see that author and speaker Brennan Manning had encountered a God that was wild about us as we are and not as we should be. And I wanted that. So many of us live with shame, believing we’re not acceptable as we are, but the very good news of the gospel is this:  We. Are. Accepted. As we are and not as we should be.

“That said, I still have to choose it. One of the guides on my journey has been Henri Nouwen. And this is his message: every day we can choose for the truth. The choice is mine, and the choice is yours. I choose for my unalterable belovedness.”

She later writes, “The bottom line is this: God gives us what we most need. He provides us with what our mothers lacked and with what our fathers lacked. To name God as parent is to be claimed by God as child, and is, in a very particular way, to have access to the eternal resources of the face and voice that do not fail.”

Amen and Amen.

To buy the book: Amazon

And Margot’s website