Perfectly Imperfect

I never quite understood how God could love me. I mean I’m human and I screw up… daily. I fail my husband and I get frustrated with my friends. I am not patient when I need to be, I don’t think before I speak, I forget scripture, and I can be harsh. I seem to be all the things God asks me not to be in the bible. I don’t have the quite spirit of a woman with inner beauty, in fact I think quiet would be the last word used in association with my name.

For a long time, and on really bad days, I feel like a failure to God. I can picture him in heaven chatting with the angels about his kids (i’m assuming that he has the same obsession with baby photos as I do) and I can hear him talking about me. The child that won’t stay out of the candy drawer, the one who is always into something messy, the one who doesn’t quite obey, the one with ADD too severe that a shiny object distracts. I never saw myself as the child God looked at with pride.

Then I had my own child.

She drools a lot, she spits up on me, by pediatric standards she has what you’d like to call a inexpensive drugs for potency list of the most 2 “weight problem” (I kid… she is perfectly healthy), but she is mine. She is my flesh and blood and even when her diaper can’t contain her lunch and we’ve had to leave our Memorial Day fun early because she’s fussy, I love her with every fiber of my being. I love her with this completely biased, in awe of her smile kind of love because she is my child. Do I get frustrated? Sure. Do I need a break every now and then? Of course but do I wish she was someone else besides  exactly who God made her? Never.

In becoming a parent I realized that God loves me because he created me, every messy part of me. I’d like to believe he thinks my ability to knock over everything in sight without trying is funny and my love of cotton candy at age 26 is endearing (my husband doesn’t agree).  I can now look at my own child with tears welling up at her goofy little laugh and hear my heavenly father whisper, “I have loved you with an everlasting love”.  I can find peace in knowing he doesn’t wish I was someone else, he doesn’t wish I would be more like his other children because then I wouldn’t be me. It’s freeing. I have permission to be exactly who he created me to be and be confident that he loves me even when I fail, fall short, and am utterly human because at the end of the day….. I’m still his.