love on Self-Importance

There are at least ten God-created longings of the soul:  1. To see my body as sacred  2. To be wanted, desired  3. To be loved without condition  4. To be intimately connected to God  5. T...

The antidote to exhaustion is not rest but wholeheartedness.

Thomas Merton once said, “Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self, This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. A...

The Christian’s self-understanding is that she is precious before God—however much a sinner, however much a failure (or success) she may be by the standards of worldly comparisons—and that every other...

Define yourself radically as beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is an illusion.

Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation...

My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.

My friend Christina, a licensed therapist, tells me that Psychiatry 101 teaches therapists that when you and I choose to believe a lie about ourselves, it’s one of these three lies we believe: I’m he...

The Christian Gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same ti...

Our true identity is to love without fear and insecurity. Our higher potential finds us when we set our course in that direction. The power of love and compassion transforms insecurity.

While exploring an experience of deep guilt and shame with her spiritual director, the author of Madeleine L’Engle, wrote One time I was talking to Canon Tallis, who is my spiritual director as we...

Love . . . is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

Adapted from Ch 4 of On Getting out of Bed. Why is Existence Good? Living for the sake of living—doing things so that you can continue to efficiently do things—begs the question, Why live? To live...

“Would I rather be feared or loved? That’s easy. Both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.”

Lord, only You are significant enough to deserve glory. So why do we desire glory for ourselves? Lord, to know You is to have eternal life. So why are we satisfied with worldly wisdom and living in th...

Cultures like ours encourage us to consider all aspects of our lives in terms of self-interest. How do we cultivate a life marked by God’s love – a love that is always directed toward the needs of oth...

Gracious Father, too often we base our worth on our performance. We believe if we do well, your love grows, and if we falter, your love lessens. Our God, how far this is from the truth. We confess our...

The fact is there is nothing that we are doing that God could not raise up a stone in the field to do for him. The realization of this puts us in our true place. Though, lest we get too knocked down by...

If I asked you the same question I asked my patient Aaron—“What do you want?”—and you could for a moment put aside the predictable anxiety that comes with it, I’m confident that at some point in your ...

What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it- that He knows me. I am graven on the palms of His hands. I am never out o...

At the core of every project of self-salvation is the staunch unwillingness to believe that God’s love and forgiveness can be unmerited. Those who would try and save themselves prefer work to rest, ef...

Identities—what makes us who we are, the kind of people we are—is what we love. More specifically, our identity is shaped by what we ultimately love or what we love as ultimate—what, at the end of the...

Everyone longs to be loved. And the greatest thing we can do is to let people know that they are loved and capable of loving.

Gracious God, we love with our preferences in mind rather than your sacrifices in mind. We default to comfort and control rather than release and trust. We think of ourselves before we think of others...

Every time you feel hurt, offended, or rejected, you have to dare to say to yourself: “These feelings, strong as they may be, are not telling me the truth about myself. The truth, even though I cannot...

We know that there is an enormous power inherent in each of us, at every moment in time, to experience the unbounded love and deep joy which is potentially our inheritance.

And yet I decide, every day, to set aside what I can do best and attempt what I do very clumsily--open myself to the frustrations and failures of loving, daring to believe that failing in love is bett...

Our God, we have been slow to stand and slow to act. We have been unmoved in the face of wrongs. Rather than welcoming others, we have put up walls. We have served this god of self-preservation. But y...

Context of Galatians I still remember my intro to New Testament class in college and the professor discussing Paul’s letter to the Galatians. All of Paul’s other letters begin with words of adoration...

We cannot prioritize our doing before being, our assignment before healing, our service before freedom.