JUST THE WAY YOU ARE

God loves you JUST THE WAY YOU ARE right now! My dreams are filled with the echoes of this sentence. Nine words that changed my way of thinking and experiencing, but that I could not hear for the first 53 years of my life. Those 53 years were filled with self-doubt and hatred of who I thought I was; a sinner they told us in church. I knew in my heart that I had broken most of the ten commandments at one point in my life, or another. I knew I had a black heart and that I could never expect God to love me as I was...One day, in my 53rd year, I lay in a hospital and could not sleep. I wanted to pray but felt that God would not listen to someone like me...The hours dragged on, I lay in the cold, dark room and stared at the ceiling tiles, counting their little holes. I became very still inside-I had the physical feeling that I was being talked to, that words were being formed-and then I "felt" the following words inside my being. "God loves you just as you are right now."...I gasped and said aloud, "What?" and then I heard a second time, "God loves you just as you are right now." Just as I am right NOW? Could that possibly be? And then I felt a change in my heart, as if a door had been opened; a door I had kept locked for years. Pure joy and intense love filled me and overflowed into my body and then out into the small, square room. I suddenly knew that I was very loved just as I am; the good and the bad. I felt that God would be disappointed by my negative choices, and that consequences follow from breaking laws, but that all of that didn't stop him from loving me; the real me...God loves YOU just as you are right now.