Lunch period was always my most dreaded class period in school. While others couldn’t wait to be set loose for 40 minutes to be with their friends, this favorite part of most kids day was for me a torment. For many reasons I won’t go into here, I didn’t sync with the other kids in my class.

I knew when I walked into the cafeteria that it would be an embarrassing experience scanning the tables crowded with jostling and laughing kids for a place where I might be able to fit in. I wasn’t friendless, certainly, but I knew I wasn’t the one that everyone wanted on their table. Far from the life of the party I always felt outside and boring. It is an image I have had of myself that has remained with me through the years.

Recently on retreat I found myself asking Jesus: “Will you leave me, drop me, because I am not interesting enough?” Isn’t that the fear we all have. That somehow God won’t be so captivated with love for us that he’ll decide we are not worth being with for the long haul?

These were Jesus’ words I felt that he said in my heart:

“It is I who have planted my tent on your land. It is I who have desired to possess your soul… It is I who have chosen you. My choice is irrevocable. I choose to love your story—all of it. It is not a journey from bad to good. It is a life from seed to blossom. You have survived the blights and bugs, the storms, the bending and breaking, MY mending and molding. And now in MY garden, you are blossoming. It is ALL good.”

“Acknowledge your journey and all you’ve survived….”

In the Song of Songs the Lover whispers his love to his Beloved repeatedly: “How beautiful you are.”

This little book of the Bible is really all about her beauty, a beauty that the Lover has bestowed on her. Her beauty, even a passing glimpse of this beauty which he has given her, captivates his heart. As I was reading the Song of Songs on retreat, it struck me that the Lover, God, tells the Beloved, the soul, that she is precisely this, only this: beautiful. This is the one thing most of us in this culture want where so many are fixed and tucked and airbrushed to appear more beautiful.

When I heard my Dad say of my Mom, who had lived four years in memory care with late-stage Alzheimer’s, “Mom is so beautiful. She is still beautiful. She was always beautiful,” I am deeply moved. At that point, Mom wasn’t interesting to be with, she hadn’t done anything for him in a decade, and she most likely didn’t actually know who he was when he faithfully visited her at least twice a day.

After sixty years, Mom had gone from seed to blossom. She had become entirely the one God loves and cares for and fusses around, like a mother would a child. Her journey has taken her through many sufferings and much heartache, joys and laughter and love and sacrifice and care. She has survived. Indeed, she has triumphed. She passed into eternity several months ago, and now she enjoys what we struggle to understand and so often get wrong.

One thing that will help you become the Child you are…

For the Church, we are persons who live before God. What constitutes us is our relationship with God, the fact that God loves us, that God loves ME, that God loves ME with such a singular, passionate love that he called ME into being, each of us, called into being to exist forever before him.

The child who can do nothing but cry, the mature woman or man at the peak of their life, the person sunk in old age, or even lost to the world in dementia, are all the same person before God: beautiful.

We are beautiful when we are successful and when our lives seem torn apart into shreds. We are beautiful when we are surrounded by love and when we wander along, fearing no one wants us. We are beautiful to God, as Mom was still and always beautiful to Dad, as we survive the blights and the bugs, the storms, the bending and the breaking, God’s mending and molding… We are beautiful in God’s beautiful garden. And it is all beautiful.

One thing you might do in a moment of prayer with Jesus after Communion or before the Eucharist in adoration, is to make a list of the things that you try to hide even from yourself, those things that you have decided “aren’t beautiful.”

At the bottom write:

“It is I who have chosen you, I, Jesus. My choice is irrevocable. I choose to love your story… All of it… Every last inch of the woven tapestry of your life is beautiful to me.”

Is there one thing on your list that Jesus begins to open up for you to see in a new way? Allow Jesus to say to you these words,

“I enjoy being around you. I want to spend time with you. I love wasting time with you. From forever I have lavished my Heart’s attention on you.”

Image Credit: Photo by Garon Piceli