The Girl And Her God: A Heart Catching Up to Reality

I’ve written before about how God placed a longing within us that only a deep, personal relationship with Him can truly satisfy.

Healthy relationships aren’t something I ever really learned how to build or practice. Honestly, I didn’t realize I needed to until very recently.

But from what I’ve gathered, it seems like my relationship with God needs to move from a distant concept and sense of “duty” to a living, breathing connection.

A healthy relationship isn’t just knowing what someone has done. It’s allowing yourself to see their heart behind it. When someone sacrifices for you, serves you, or loves you deeply, truly seeing the heart behind it naturally draws a response from you. Without it, the relationship can begin to feel more like an obligation than a bond between two people.

I want that. I want to have a connection with God that lets me see His heart. I don’t know what that fully looks like, but I know where I’m going to start.

I don’t want to just define the Incarnation. I want to contemplate what it cost…

I’m not trying to manufacture emotion. I’m trying to meditate on what is objectively true until my heart catches up to reality.

I want to move from knowing facts about God to actually perceiving the heart of God revealed in those facts.

In a supreme act of meekness, God, who is infinitely above all things, did not cling to the privileges of His divine status. He humbled Himself and stepped into His own creation, embracing the weakness, suffering, and limitations of human life.

The omnipresent God entered the confines of a womb, a specific village, and a physical body that could be in only one place at a time.

The Sustainer of the universe allowed Himself to be fed, protected, and carried by a young human mother whom He had created.

The One who designed human legs learned to walk. The One who gave us voices learned to speak. The One who designed the body to need food and sleep allowed Himself to feel hunger and exhaustion.

The Holy One exposed Himself to the raw, jarring friction of a broken world—feeling dust on His feet, splinters in His hands, and the sting of human betrayal.

And He didn’t enter all of this merely to experience human life. He entered it to rescue us from the trouble we caused for ourselves.

God’s perfect holiness can never exist in harmony with evil, yet His perfect love refuses to abandon His creation. If He gives us what justice demands, we are undone; if He simply ignores sin, He won’t be Who He says He is.

The Incarnation and the cross are where we see the tension between these realities resolved.

On the cross, God did not waive His justice or abandon His mercy. He stepped into the gap Himself. In one fell swoop, Christ bears our sin, reconciles us to God, defeats sin and death, and opens the way back into communion with God.

And the communion He restores is not an optional addition to human life. It is what we were created for.

A fish can spend its whole life searching for satisfaction on the beach. It can flop farther and farther from the water believing, “Surely it’s over there.”

The tragedy is that what it’s looking for is what it’s currently flopping away from.

Putting the fish back in water isn’t depriving the fish of anything.

It’s returning it to the only environment it can thrive in. The only place it can be alive.

Likewise, we can spend years searching for satisfaction in success, pleasure, approval, control, comfort, or achievement—not realizing we’re searching for the One we were made for—the only “environment” we can live in—a relationship with Him.

The Creator was not recognized by His own creation. Creatures He made beat Him and murdered Him. He could have saved Himself, but He chose to endure it in order to save the very people doing it.

What kind of love is this?

Now bring that closer.

Even now, while I still struggle with sin, He refuses to give up on me.

As I frantically search for what only He can give, He keeps pursuing me.

He keeps loving me in a way that makes me want to stop running, receive His love, and return to Him.

And all of this when…

He does not need me.

I need Him.

He made me.

He bought me.

He loves me fiercely.

I am His.

And I wouldn’t want it any other way.