You are Loved

My friend Holley Gerth is doing this amazing thing this year.  In the middle of all the negativity and the criticism and judgment that swirls about, especially that lobbed by women against other women at times, she’s offering encouragement.

She calls it Coffee for Your Heart.

And every week she offers us a prompt where she asks us to write an encouraging word to women or a woman, and today’s prompt was:

You Are Loved.

This struck me so because I wanted to write this encouraging word to one “becoming woman” in particular.  She is beautiful and full of God’s passion and presence, but she is struggling.

I began to write her earlier this week.  I shared a few scriptures that I had been praying for her.  She’s in these in between years.  They are fun and exciting and full of promise.  They are terrifying and excruciating and full of others expectation.

I love her so much.

I can nearly see out over the horizon.  I can just begin to glimpse the ways in which she will rise and glow and pierce the Kingdom of Heaven with her light.

But I feel her pain.  Her insecurity.  Her doubt.

I know it.  I know the pressure.  The expectations.

If I could say one thing, over all the din of everyone else’s voices today, if I could shout over the competing claims on her spirit, I would declare from the depths of my soul: I. LOVE. YOU.

God loves you.

He has such goodness in store for you, darling one.

Those failures.  The ones that feel so acute right now.  Oh I know, I’ve had them.  They are temporary.  A little blip on the screen of how HE will use you.

And when you feel like you’ve let Him down.  Like you’ve let others down.  Like you’ve let yourself down.  Please know that He offers grace.  That I offer grace.  So give yourself a little grace.  And know that love covers a multitude of sins.

This is what I prayed, with tears streaming down my face, for you this morning:

We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all God’s people—the faith and love that spring from the hope stored up for you in heaven and about which you have already heard in the true message of the gospel that has come to you. In the same way, the gospel is bearing fruit and growing throughout the whole world—just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and truly understood God’s grace…For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light.  For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.  (Colossians 1)

 You are beautiful.

You are destined for amazing things.

You are HIS!

You are loved.