Until you know you are loved

What it takes to be truly happy in this world

So it’s been a while, which is probably more predictable here now than otherwise. There was one more portion of Aggressively Happy by Joy Marie Clarkson I was wanting to post before moving on, and it begins with a story from Maundy Thursday, so now seems an apt time to post it. This one gets at the crux of how to be happy in this world. Without doing too much online therapy, I’ve wasted enormous amounts of emotional energy on relational situations that would have been obviously hopeless to any astute observer, and I have had to ask myself why I did so and abandoned myself in the process, and it was all part of the jumbled mire on the road to truly imbibing the knowledge that I am loved by God and secure in him.

Last night in our Maundy Thursday service we sang one of my favourite old hymns, I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say, which I have been singing about the house today. I won’t post the lyrics and take this post in too many different directions, but might I encourage readers to google and soak them in. 

But now to the quote:

If we don’t have the question of identity settled by the acceptance of love, the stakes of everything are high. If we feel that our identity, value and lovability are in question, then in every experience, relationship, and accomplishment we search for the final evidence of our okay-ness. If our sense of self is not rooted and secured in the infinite love of God, we will spend our whole lives tossing relationships, jobs, accomplishments, piety and personal beauty into an infinite chasm that only the gentleness of God can fill. People aren’t people to us; they are validations of our lovability. Jobs aren’t jobs; they are proof that we really are useful and worth something. Adulation is a lifeline; every rejection confirms our worst suspicions. 

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Ironically, refusing the love of God and others has a tendency to make us intensely self-centred. When you’re so wrapped up in thinking about yourself and how unloveable you are, there’s no room to think about other people. You don’t have the capacity to love people without trying to make them the solution to your deep chasm of loneliness. You’re not able to do a job for the pure joy of excellence, because you need it to validate you as a valuable, contributing member of society. The whole world becomes an extension of your need to be validated, seen, loved, approved of. And when the whole world is only as big as your own hurt, it is a very cramped and crabby universe indeed. 

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I truly believe you cannot be happy in this world until you know you are loved, deep in your soul, all the way down to your dusty, smelly toes, which Jesus would happily wash. That secure love is what enables you to think about other people.

When that question is settled, so is everything else. It is only when we realise that God loves us that we can feel fundamentally and permanently okay, that we are able to fully give ourselves in relationships without losing ourselves, that we can invest ourselves in worthwhile work and enjoy experiences. You can lose and not be lost. You can enjoy things—friendship, romance, work—as gifts when you no longer have to seize them as evidence of your existential value. And it frees you up to be brave. You can try tremendously, because if you fall, it is only into gentle arms.

Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash