I struggled for many years with God’s love for me. I knew he loved others. I believe he loved the world. In the most general sense, I knew, in my head, he loved me. The distance from the knowledge in my head to the space in my heart aching to be loved unconditionally was strewn with debris, twisted and turned around obstacles of wrong thinking and over chasms of brokenness. It seemed impassable!

It was in my early years of healing that I received a note from a friend. She wrote to say she was praying this prayer for me.

¹⁴When I think of all this, I fall to my knees and pray to the Father, ¹⁵the Creator of everything in heaven and on earth. ¹⁶I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit. ¹⁷Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong. ¹⁸And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. ¹⁹May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.

Ephesians 3:14-19

I wanted her to fix it, to snap her fingers and change how I felt. But it didn’t happen that way. I had to experience the love of Christ. I needed to start taking note of his presence in my every day. My thoughts about myself needed to change, to align with what He said about me. I needed to see myself like he saw me, not the way I feared he saw me.

So today as I write, I pray this prayer for every person who will read this post. I pray that you might experience the love of Christ in a new and profound way. I pray that you see yourself as he sees you — as a precious treasure, one that he is willing to sell all to find from wherever it is you have wandered to on this day.