Belovedness Insights

You are my child, whom I love. With you I am well-pleased. - Mark 1:11

As we reflect on the words of blessing we each need, today we’ll listen in on a wise friend sharing insights with us about what it means to have someone else behold us and call us beloved. Let the Spirit speak to you as you read and reflect.

Every trauma survivor knows the issue isn’t what was done to me. The issue is what everything that was done to me did to me and that I’ve internalized it. It’s just endless, the things that hinder us from becoming the person deep down that we really are and long to be…. In a sense, our real Higher Power is [often not God, but is instead] our shame-based belief that our shortcomings and faults and brokenness have the authority to name who we are. It’s the idolatry of brokenness over the Love that loves us as invincibly precious in our brokenness. This is really the key to this whole thing. It isn’t just that I’m broken; I must also admit that I believe I am what’s wrong with me….  

It’s such a powerful experience to be in the presence of someone who sees our brokenness—maybe because they live with us and it’s obvious, or it’s a therapist, or a friend, or at a recovery meeting—and who sees through the brokenness to the invincible preciousness of our self in the midst of our brokenness. When we risk sharing what hurts the most in the presence of someone who will not invade us or abandon us, we can come upon within ourselves the pearl of great price, the invincible preciousness of ourselves in the midst of our brokenness.  

Through a person’s unconditional positive regard for us, we can start to find our footing in an unconditional positive regard for ourselves. And that unconditional positive regard for ourselves is joining God in seeing who God knows us to be before the origins of the universe as invincibly precious, indestructible in God’s eyes.  - James Finley, Mystical Sobriety