in your embrace (II).
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. 1
Your love surrounds me. Your light has found me
I part of me wanted to invert the lyrics from In Your Embrace to "Your light surrounds me. Your love has found me", but I didn't feel like that aligned with my experience.
It has been more like:
"Your light has found me... ignore.
"Your light has found me... ignore.
"Your light has found me... hmm... ignore.
"Your wrath has found me... understood.
"Your love surrounds me."
Not exactly hit-single material.
His Love...
The more I walk, the more I realize I have to reassess what I know from what I believe. What I thought I believed turns out to be something I just knew and sometimes the gap is wider than I thought. There is one believe I'm confident in...
His love is unconditional.
No matter how many times I mess up—no matter how bad, how ugly, how shameful—God is still there, still loving me, still welcoming me back.
It’s the fuel of my hope. Without it, my faith would crumble to the ground.
At the start of my journey, even with God's personal calling, I continued to fall over and over and over. And I can guarantee you that if we talk some time in the future I'd have fresh stories of my recent stumbles.
God could snapped His fingers and made us new in an instant. I know that. But He didn't. At least not for me and he probably won't for you either. He wants us to do the work and make the necessary changes.
But it's not easy to peel off decades of darkness. Friday nights have always been the time to fuel up on gluttony: TV shows, movies, junk food, late-nights, porn, etc.
As I continued in my journey those things didn't just come to a halt, but I started to feel guilty. So I kept, and will keep, on running back to God. As I did I began to realize that God's love is always there; unconditionally.
However,
Unconditional love doesn’t mean God ignores what I do or that there are no consequences for my actions. It means that no matter where I’ve been, I can always come back.
The beautiful thing about that is that the more you come back the more you don’t want to leave.
...In Dark Times
One of the biggest idols in my life is greed and a love of money. And ironically, that’s exactly what God used to reach me—because if there was anywhere I was going to recognize Him, it was through money.
In 2024, I found myself in one of my darkest financial moments—but not because of reckless spending or financial irresponsibility (...well partly 😗). It was the result of me slipping back into my old ways in other areas of my life, without any repentance or guilt. So God decided to punish me and unleash His heat on the back of my neck, making sure I felt the weight of it.
For the first time ever, I was on the brink of complete financial exhaustion. I had burned through every possible option—maxed-out credit cards, drained retirement accounts, sold off investments, emptied my HSA.
There was nothing left.
I had maybe a week’s worth of money to survive on, and then, out of nowhere, God delivered a job offer (an offer I already convinced myself was a lost cause and moved on from). The first paycheck landed soon after I expected to run out of everything.
Financially, the new job pays 30% less than my previous one. But somehow, it’s 1000% better. It’s nearly a perfect fit—the people, the projects, the industry, the location—everything.
And yeah, I wouldn’t mind getting that 30% back, but what’s interesting is that, even though I objectively have less, for some reason, it feels like I have more.
Maybe that's the feeling that God has to offer.