“What if I’m not lovable?”  This is one of life’s central questions.  As children, we learn that there are some things that we can do that result in rejection.  Our friends, teachers, coaches, and sometimes even parents teach us from an early age that we are loved when we are good and beautiful and clean and unloved when we are bad and ugly and dirty.  The perfect get love and the imperfect don’t.  If we were to admit our imperfection, we would risk a loss of love.  And so begins the lifelong quest to portray ourselves as perfect and to hide our imperfections and failures.  But what if that is not true.  What if we are perfectly and scandalously loved right now even in our imperfection?

One of the gifts of Henry’s death is a very real understanding of how imperfect I am. Having kids was so important to Sarah and me.  We did everything “right.”  We waited until we felt financially and emotionally ready, until we knew they would be coming into a stable and functioning home.  We waited for seven years, past the early marriage speed bumps.  We waited until we were both out of graduate school.  We waited until I passed the bar exam.  We waited until we were well established in our careers.  When we decided to try to have a baby, Sarah started taking prenatal vitamins with the recommended daily allowance of folic acid long before she was even pregnant.  We researched the “best” car seats, the “safest” cribs, the most nutritious foods, how long to breast feed, the most developmentally appropriate baby toys, and how to best introduce language to the baby.  We timed out the spacing between each baby so that all three children were exactly three years and one month apart – September, October three years later, and November three years after that.  We traveled to over forty countries with the kids and introduced them to cultures and people all over the world.  Every time they went to the beach or the pool, they wore their sun shirts and so much sunscreen so that they glowed like Moses on Mount Sinai.

I did it “right.”  I knew the best way to raise children.  Then, on August 3, 2016, my wife called to tell me that our youngest son Henry had found a plastic bag outside of his crib and had somehow gotten it over his head and suffocated.  Despite our best intentions and preparations, Henry found a danger within his reach that had been completely unnoticed, one for which we were unable to be prepare or protect him.

There is nothing like losing your child and having your world fall apart to give you the opportunity to see just how frail you really are.  There is power in vulnerability.  We all wear masks.  We never really let people in for fear that they won’t like us.  We know there is a good chance that if we let people see us for who we really are, they won’t stick around for very long.  There is one thing at the heart of this game – fear.  In our hearts we don’t think we are worthy of love and acceptance.  We always wonder, “Am I okay?  Am I enough?  Am I loved?”

A few months ago our dog Maggie died.  She was over thirteen years old and one of the most loyal and loving labrador retrievers you could ever meet.  We got Maggie the summer I took the bar exam.  It was a chance to try out parenting without screwing up an actual person.  We were young and had no money.  Maggie was with us for all of our major life events.  She welcomed and accepted her shifting role as we brought one, then two, then three babies into our family while she slid further and further down the chain of importance.

Towards the end, Maggie was sick and in declining health.  She wasn’t suffering so we wanted her to live as long as she could, but it was tough having her in the house.  She lost control of her bowels and her bladder.  She would defecate involuntarily wherever she lay.    Every day involved slipping on a new surprise puddle of urine and a daily exercise of walking through the house with a spray bottle of 409 and paper towels cleaning up the brown smears on the living room and kitchen tiles.  She started using our expensive Persian carpets as a toilet so we had to pull them up.  We moved her out to the back patio where the mess was not as noticeable but she would immediately soil her bed.

One weekend, while Sarah and I were picking up Maggie’s reeking bed, covered in feces and urine, I thought of the words of the Prophet Isaiah in chapter 64 verse 6, that “all our righteous acts are like filthy rags.”  It struck me that God is so holy and I am so unholy that to him not only my sin, but also my attempts at doing good are like the disgusting and putrid rags I was, at that very moment, trying to wash.  On my own power, in my own strength, I am incapable of righteousness – my attempts at goodness are simply not enough.  There is nothing I can do to ever be enough for God – no act, no sacrifice, no grand gesture – nothing to earn God’s love and approval.  Paul reminds us in Romans that there is no one righteous, not even one.  God justified sinners like me by grace through faith.

Smelling Maggie’s filthy bed made me think how much God loves me to forgive my sins and justify me through His grace.  God forgives me and washes me clean no matter how dirty I have gotten along the way.  The good news of grace means that I am completely loved and accepted – not as I should be, or could be, or wish I was, but as I am.  It means that I can stop lying to myself that I have it all figured out.  It means that I can take off my mask and let people see me for who I really am, a broken bundle of paradoxes.  No excuses.  I am not okay.  I can take ownership of my brokenness.  I can also love others in their brokenness.

It seems too good to accept.  We all know that there is no free lunch.  We get what we earn.  What goes around comes around.  Only, with God, that’s just not true.  God knows you and loves you anyway.  Even in your failure God loves you.  Jesus explained God’s scandalous love in the parable of the prodigal son, who squandered his father’s wealth and good reputation with prostitutes and wild living.  After spending his father’s money, the son returned to his father to ask if he could work for his father as a hired servant.  The son didn’t deserve forgiveness.  The father should have refused the son.  The father should have made the son grovel.  The father should have said “I told you so!”  That’s what the son deserved.  The son had his speech planned out, but he never even got a chance to say it before the father made the first move.  Jesus says that while the son was still a long way off, the father ran to the son, embraced him, and kissed him.  That’s how God sees you.  He loves you and is ready to embrace you even though you are dirty.

The good news of God’s grace means that we are perfectly loved.  We don’t have to do anything, nor can we do anything to earn that love.  Because of God’s perfect love we don’t have to be afraid.  The Apostle John said that God is love and that perfect love drives out fear.  When we fully accept that we are truly loved it frees us from the agonizing and tedious task of keeping up appearances.  It also frees us to love others fully, as they are, in their failures and weakness.  We can give grace because of God’s grace.  What good news!

God’s perfect love for imperfect people is the central theme of the Gospel.  God knows us completely.  He knows the secrets and shame that we try to cover.  God loves us with a scandalous love that seeks us out in our frailty, imperfection, and wretchedness.  Brennan Manning puts it like this in the The Ragamuffin Gospel:

Because salvation is by grace through faith, I believe that among the countless number of people standing in front of the throne and in front of the Lamb, dressed in white robes and holding palms in their hands (see Revelation 7:9), I shall see the prostitute from the Kit-Kat Ranch in Carson City, Nevada, who tearfully told me that she could find no other employment to support her two-year-old son. I shall see the woman who had an abortion and is haunted by guilt and remorse but did the best she could faced with grueling alternatives; the businessman besieged with debt who sold his integrity in a series of desperate transactions; the insecure clergyman addicted to being liked, who never challenged his people from the pulpit and longed for unconditional love; the sexually abused teen molested by his father and now selling his body on the street, who, as he falls asleep each night after his last ‘trick’, whispers the name of the unknown God he learned about in Sunday school; the deathbed convert who for decades had his cake and ate it, broke every law of God and man, wallowed in lust, and raped the earth.

‘But how?’ we ask.

Then the voice says, ‘They have washed their robes and have made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’

There they are. There we are – the multitude who so wanted to be faithful, who at times got defeated, soiled by life, and bested by trials, wearing the bloodied garments of life’s tribulations, but through it all clung to faith.

 My friends, if this is not good news to you, you have never understood the gospel of grace.