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Life of the Beloved

My Father says, "you are my beloved." I say I am "unlovable."

Quite honestly, I often feel a sense of alienation so strong that the incessant scraping of that awareness would soon cause my soul to bleed, if a soul could bleed. It's the kind of scraping that steadily breaches the callousness of my heart and exposes raw flesh in all of its dark redness and fleshy tenderness.

The difficulty is that along with this sense or awareness of alienation, at the same time, I feel a deep sense of longing. I often think I could manage a whole lot better if I only sensed the awareness of alienation, and not the sense of longing to be loved. The indescribable longing to be loved, longing to feel worth, longing to experience the satisfaction of an intimate relationship with a lover, or a deep friendship, or a committed family. But alas, it is absent. Or is it? Am I not my Father's beloved son?

I realize that living in a giant organized mess called "the city", these feelings are an all to familiar scenario across the board. Loneliness, dissatisfaction, emptiness, rejection, all creep up like mangy buzzards squabbling over mangled carrion thoughtlessly hurled to the shoulder of a deserted highway. Us city-dwellers are so close to each other, but we care so little about each other. Our one motive in the city is to prove ourselves more worthy than the other, to prove that we are more loved than the other. Yet, like most, though I say I believe it to be true, I do not actually believe it: My deep sense of longing is only satisfied when I grab on to the fact that I am my Father's beloved son and nothing else.

Most of the time the alienation erupts out of my own personal self-rejection of who I am (or am not), and what I am doing (or not doing), and where I am going (or not going). Consuming thoughts of my inabilities, my imperfections, my incapacities, my past failures all mount an army large enough to conquer the likes of the greatest human empire to ever exist. There is always someone with more money, someone better looking, someone more popular, someone more spiritual, someone more gifted, someone more talented. Will I ever live up to the standard I set for myself? It's impossible, I would have to be perfect, if not divine - and I am neither. I alienate myself from myself. I divide myself against myself. It's not enough that I live in a world full of conniving, scheming, manipulative people and institutions. I become my own enemy when I reject what God has made me, where he has put me, and how he is dealing with me. I become my own enemy when I fail to grasp that I am God's beloved son. A son who is taken, blessed, broken, and given.

Ultimately, in rejecting myself, I reject my Father. The alienation I perceive is really a deceptive tool of the powers of darkness stringing me along a grungy path of self-inflicted death. I reject my God when he calls me his beloved son and I quickly call myself a wretch, a failure, or unloved. If I only realized I did not have to live up the standards I set for myself; standards growing out of the manipulative conniving of this world's systems. If I realized it I would be set free to live as one who is chosen, blessed, broken, and given in life and death, as one who is the Father's beloved son. After all, the standards of this world are set up only to gain power, prestige, wealth, fame, glory. All these to simply prove that I am worthy and loved! But these standards are faulty because I am already beloved! The only standard is that in whatever I do, in whoever I am, in where ever I go, I am still my Father's beloved son.

Thank you, Henri Nouwen, for making this truth so tangible, so plain, so real.

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