Vulnerable Love
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Let’s start with a simple question: When do we not feel loved?
Some answers come quickly:
- When we’re ridiculed or belittled
- When we’re taken advantage of or used
- When we’re dismissed, overlooked, or not taken into account
- When we’re neglected—noticed, maybe, but not truly cared for
But there are other, less obvious ways we can miss love:
- When someone cares for us, but never really connects with us
- When we’re served, but not allowed to give anything in return
- When we’re known, but not invited to know the other person
At its core, real love is vulnerable.
It doesn’t hold back. It doesn’t hide behind self-protection. It moves toward connection—and in that connection, something new and shared begins to grow.
This is the kind of love we see in Jesus.
He became fully human and fully engaged with people. He allowed Himself to be misunderstood, rejected, and hurt—and yet He kept loving. How? Because He lived rooted in the love of His Father. His wounds were met with hea...
No More Fear Paralysis
When was the last time you failed? Was it huge or a small mistake, a breakdown or a collapse – or have you intentionally suppressed memories of your failure?
Most of us hate failure. Failing makes us feel ashamed. It threatens our identity – as if our identity could be built on consistent, flawless performance.
We need to remember, however, that failure is a significant and important part of life. The only way a child will ever learn to walk is by failing thousands of times. People of great accomplishment have a long string of failures to which they can very easily point.
Winston Churchill, widely regarded as one of world’s great wartime heroes, defined success as “going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
The best way to deal with a fear of failure is to press ahead, try some new things and fail a few times. You will find that the fear of shame associated with the fear of failure is ten times worse than the actual failure. The paralyzing questions related to, “W...
What To Do When Your Sin Is Exposed
Most of us live in deep fear of being found out. We are scared of people knowing us deeply; our weaknesses, inadequacies, fears, doubts and sin. We are deeply ashamed of our condition. Yet, we all have darknesses – we are all very flawed, and our responses to our conditions are
peppered with brokenness.
Coming clean with who we are and what we have done can feel terrifying … apart from the grace of God. Letting others, God or even ourselves know just how corrupted parts of our souls are raises fears. We are afraid of being judged, condemned – or worst of all – rejected. So, we are tempted to deny or hide our “stuff.” We try to tell ourselves and/or others that we either didn’t do what we did, or that it wasn’t really sin when we did it. We often coat our motives with feigned good intentions. We perform these mental gymnastics because it’s too scary to admit the truth about ourselves … apart from the grace of God.
The Good News, however, is that God (our Creator) knows who we are – that w...
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