The Healing Journey

October 28, 2023

“God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.”
— St.  Augustine

Venerable Fulton Sheen once offered this advice to those who didn’t think they were worthy of God’s love: “Think a little less about whether you deserve to be loved by him. He loves you even though you are not deserving. It is his love alone that will make you deserving. Most of us are unhappy because we never give God a chance to love us. We are in love only with ourselves. Say to yourself over and over again regardless of what happens: ‘God loves me!’ Then add: ‘And I will try to love him!’”

So many young people don’t believe they’re worthy of love because they come from troubled homes where love is always conditional. As a result, they look for love in all the wrong places, such as gangs, social media and destructive relationships. And they use those pursuits as a substitute to fill an emptiness that only God can fill.

The same is true for those of us on the healing journey. When something bad happens in our lives, we resort to the old and persistent fallacies that God was punishing us for something we did, or that God was punishing us because we don’t deserve to be loved.

Thinking like that makes healing hard.

We may have a difficult time loving ourselves, but God still loves us because he made us and wants to bring us into an intimate and personal relationship with him.

It’s easy to think that with so many others “competing” for God’s love, he loves only the best and the brightest and that his love is nothing more than a divine entitlement program. That’s not true either. He loves us individually and intimately, and He’s watching over us every moment in our journey, trying to direct us, trying to encourage us, trying to make us realize how much he loves us. Isn’t that a relief?

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There may be billions of people in the world, but God loves you because you’re you.