I had a fight with a five-year-old today. She was wearing a Cinderella dress and two tutus and told me she was pretending to be a princess.
“Oh, Natalie!” I said, in that voice I use when I’m trying to get little ones excited about something. “You don’t have to pretend. You are a princess!”
Natalie was not amused.
“Yes, because a princess is a daughter of the king and your Father is the king!”
“My daddy is not a king,” she stubbornly replied. I tried to convince her. I laid out the argument. She agreed with all my premises, that God is her Father, that he’s king of heaven, that the daughters of kings are princesses. But she would not accept my conclusion.
The exchange felt a lot like conversations I’ve had with older girls—and adult women. They know intellectually that they’re loved by God, but they’ve bought into the lie that they’re not good enough. And so they pay lip service to God’s unending love and go happily back to hating themselves.
Being a Christian is so often about choosing God’s truth over the world’s lies, and I think we get that. We choose chastity and sobriety, we choose confession and fasting, we choose life and we march to support it. We’re glad to be radically different on all those surface issues, but we ignore the central truth of Christianity, that truth without which none of the rest of it makes sense:
God loves you.
Deeply, desperately loves you. He made you exactly as you are—on purpose—because he wanted you that way. From before the creation of the universe, God was planning your too-frizzy hair or too-loud laugh or too-big butt and loving it.
The world tells us the lie that we’re not smart enough or pretty enough or thin enough or athletic enough or popular enough or whatever. Popular Christianity counters with: yes, but God loves me anyway.
LIE!!
God doesn’t love you anyway—he loves you exactly this way! Sure, there are parts of you that are sinful or unhealthy and he wants to walk you through those. But he even loves you in your sin and your addiction. He loves every little bit of you. He’s captivated by you. Why?
Because you’re a princess, a daughter of the King.
The princesses in our stories are beautiful, yes, but they are also brave and clever—in the good stories anyway. More importantly, though, princesses are wonderful simply because of who they are. They don’t have to earn our love. We even love the awkward and plain ones in the stories we read as tweens. We love them because they are daughters of the King. He loves them, and that makes them good enough.
My friends, you are beautiful—so beautiful. You are brave and clever and strong. You are funny and sweet and loving. Maybe you’re a little short or sweaty or slow, but can’t you see that God is entranced by just that? Your cynicism is endearing, your chub lovely. The God of the universe made you just that way. He doesn’t make mistakes.
I need you to be strong on this one. I need you to decide today to serve God. You’ve done it in so many other ways. Today I’m asking you to believe that God is who he says he is. God is love. There is nothing about you that can change that. God is crazy in love with you—read Isaiah 62:3-5, if you don’t believe me. Or Hosea 2. Heck, read the whole book of Songs and tell me again that you’re not good enough.
You are so good. So beautiful. So loved. Don’t let the lies of this world ever convince you otherwise.
The link to your post is down. 🙁 Does that mean you can post the whole thing here now? Hopefully?
Done 🙂