I’ve Always Loved You

In 2006, I was walking to work around 7 AM and my heart was very heavy burdened to the degree where it felt as if I was dragging my feet. I asked God why He was allowing that heartache to continue, I needed to understand! What He said caught me by surprise, He said, “I’ve always loved you!” I started crying on the road, I didn’t know what to think, what to feel, what to say. Somehow He knew why I had that heartache: I was looking for love, but I didn’t receive it, while all along I had access to a fountain of eternal and perfect love pouring out from Him.

The only person who truly showed love me while growing up is my mom. I cannot describe to you how much she loves me. The daily sacrifices she makes, her service for me (and her awesome cooking!) are incomparable with anything anyone has ever offered me. I don’t remember my dad ever saying that he loved me while growing up, even though he showed it clearly (I don’t think anybody ever told him that they loved him).

I think  many of us would understand God better if He had called Himself in the Bible, “our heavenly Mother”!

When we as humans love someone, the best we can promise them is, “I will always love you!” God, however, tells us that He has always loved us! In other words: He loved us, He still does, and He will always do.

“If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” Mathew 7:11

When I was in my early teens I was madly in love with mechanical things, fixing things, “inventing” things, creating things, building stuff; I collected (and still do!) wires, motors, gears, resistors, lights, tools, pieces of wood, metals, rubber, you name it! There was not such a thing as “useless garbage” in my dictionary, everything had the potential of becoming something! The joke was that if I found a valve stem of a bicycle tire then I would be thinking, “Good!, all I have to do now is build the bike!” But, Iraq at that time was under economical sanctions and every day necessities such as glue, batteries, electricity tape were very expensive if not luxury at times.

One summer break I moved up in my creativity and decided that I was not going to build remote controlled cars anymore, but I was going to build remote controlled airplanes! My friends thought I was crazy to think I could build a remote controlled airplane just because they taught us in that year’s physics class, how the aerodynamics of an airplane works!

So, one day while I was going shopping with my dad (which I absolutely loved doing because he is a great man) he asked me if I needed batteries. I didn’t know what to say, because I needed 4 C batteries which were quite expensive. I had decided to move up from my regular AA batteries, because airplanes needed more power! I told him what I needed! He stopped at the electricity store asked for 4 C batteries; each one cost 250 dinar which is quite a lot of money, given that a teacher’s monthly salary was about 4,000 dinar! He got the batteries and gave them to me right away! My dad also knew that those batteries wasn’t going to last very long; I usually go through tens of batteries before I got a prototype to even move! It looks like my dad believed in me even when nobody else did. I usually draw on that experience to try to understand what it means that God is “my heavenly Father”.

It is also hard being in my mid 20s and not having been loved by a woman, but I usually thank God for that because I know if I find someone to love me now, with me not completely emotionally dependent on my relationship with my heavenly Father, then I would be very miserable putting my emotional wholeness in a human being.

If you made it this far, I want you to know that God wants to tell you now that, He has always loved you.