God’s Questionable Love

“So we have come to know and to believe the love God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.” I John 4:16

Knowing and believing God’s love does not come automatically. Just because we have crossed the line of faith trusting Him for our forgiveness and for eternal life does not mean we know and believe His love.

I grew up in a Christian home. From day one, I was taught about the love of God. My father was a Southern Baptist pastor in the Midwest. I grew up in an environment where I was told every day that I was loved. Each night when I was tucked into bed, my father told me how much he loved me. I would slip away to sleep in the comfort of knowing that. When I walked out the door leaving for school, my father told me he loved me. As a young child, I felt safe and secure sharing with the world around me how wonderful my father was…until he wasn’t.

Around the age of 11, I found myself fighting off the sexual advances of my father. As a young child, I was not even certain that was what was happening, but I knew there was something different about his love. There were looks and touches that made me feel uncomfortable. I could not understand therefore I questioned what I had done wrong and blamed his behavior on myself. Those night tucks into bed became more fearful for me than secure and safe. The very environment my father had created for my sense of safety became the thing I feared the most. The physical and emotional abuse also began to become a part of my daily life causing me to live in such incredible fear. I never knew what one day would bring. My father controlled the way I thought and the way I lived, filling me with such a fear that if I stepped out of his control to experience the world outside of him the abuse became harsher. I would live days, even weeks, without a word from my father, allowing him to maintain control of me, causing a fear that I had lost his love. Therefore, setting me up for more of his sexual advances. What was once love and honor for this man became survival for my own life and sanity. I became petrified of him yet if you would have asked me as a pre-teen girl, I would have told you of my deep love for him.

You see, the word love can become just a word lacking emotion and losing all sense of security and safety. It can become a misused and often abused word which allows someone to manipulate and control…well, that was my world…until I truly fell in love with God, my Heavenly Father…my Only Father!

Even though, as a young child I decided to follow Jesus and was taught of God’s unconditional love, they were just words to me. I could not understand how love could be unconditional. Love from a father or The Father was filled with fear. Every aspect of my love for God was laden with conditions. I never felt truly loved by God, yet I never departed from my faith in God. I knew I was supposed to feel loved by Him because that is what my Sunday School teachers taught me, but I had been locked inside a cage with my arms reached as far as possible longing to get one touch of God’s love. But with every attempt to reach it, God was just far enough away that my fingers never touched His love. And yet my heart longed for Him.

In this verse it says, “so we have come to know Him…” This tells me that truly knowing God’s love is a process. This truth has allowed me my process. In addition, the verse says, “so we have come…to believe the love God has for us.” This is earth shaking for me. For so many years I could not believe the love God had for me. I could be told every day but still could not believe it. I feared, and sometimes still do, that God would take His love away from me, just like my earthly father had done. I did not trust God’s love and yet I longed for it.

Throughout the years, my knowledge of God’s love has grown. I have learned that my behavior does not determine His love for me. Even greater than knowing God’s love is believing God’s love. I have grown to believe in God’s love for me. He and I have this understanding that even though I may make poor choices my belief in His love for me is anchored. Trust me, I have put His love to the test, and it still stands strong no matter what I have done. I can envision Him with a smile saying, “I’m still here Melody.”

As for you, it’s okay if you question God’s love for you. It’s a part of the process. Allow yourself to journey to the knowledge of His love for you then once you know it, your belief in His love will anchor you or as the verse says, “abide in you.”

Happy journey my friend!

Written by Melody Westbrook. 
Melody Westbrook is the founder of The Walk Ministries, a ministry designed to bring women together through God’s story. She was a pastor’s wife for 35 years and has authored the book The Walk Back to Eden. She is a communicator who loves to tell God’s story written within each of us while using her personal experience of a broken marriage and childhood survivor of abuse to communicate God’s redemption story. She loves teaching real women real stories of real life from God’s word. You can find her at http://facebook.com/thewalk.edw/ 
You can find more of Melody's posts on the PriorityNow Blog here.