Worthy of Love

I've noticed my blog posts tend to be very "doing" focused. I tell you about the places I go, the things I see, what's happening on the ship...

But there's so much more that's going on inside of me this year.  What I'm thinking about, how I'm growing, what God is teaching me; sometimes I feel like I could burst.  So, this blog is my attempt to start to sharing some of the deeper aspects of my life.

This story starts at the very beginning of my time on ship. Even though I tried not to be, I was so upset and jealous about the vast disparity in quality between cabins for singles and cabins for couples. It wasn't even that I was unhappy with my own cabin; I had great cabinmates and my cabin, though small, felt very cozy.  The real issue was that I felt "less." It seemed clear that the designers of the ship were sending a message: "Married people deserve a nicer living space than single people." I had already been struggling with being single for the last decade or more, so I'll admit, this was a sensitive area for me.

And here is what God said to me when I told him how angry I was.
               "You are worthy of love."
                                and
                  "I am pursuing you."
                                and
"If you knew all the good things I have in store for you, you wouldn't spend one second being upset about the size of your cabin."

After that, I felt a little bit better. But sometimes when God speaks to me, I doubt if it's really Him, or if I'm just making it up. Fast forward several days later, my small group was taking turns praying for each other.  The kind of listening prayer where everyone has paper and you write things down you think God might be saying for a specific person.  Maybe you can see where this is going...here's one of the papers I received that night:

                                             
This note was written by someone I had never met before that evening. She didn't know anything about me, let alone what kinds of issues I was struggling with. But God used her to let me know I really did hear Him correctly.

And so those words have become one of my themes this year. I am worthy of love, even if I am single every day of my life. The God of the universe is pursuing me. And I can trust Him...actually I'm still working on the trust thing, but that is a story for another blog post.