“You are loved harder and longer and more urgently than the ending of any Jane Austen novel.” Lisa Jo Baker, Never Unfriended
This quote cracked me up. If you’ve ever read through or watched a Jane Austen story, you know for the most part, it all shakes out in the end. The tangled relationships somehow untangle, the unrequited love finally gets acknowledged, romantic awkwardness turns into glorious togetherness… the universe stops colluding against our heroine and starts working in her favor.
We want to be pursued. We want someone to come knocking at our door. Not just in a romantic sense, but in a relational one as well. Since the earliest days in the Garden of Creation, we have been made to relate to one another and our God.
We spend an awful lot of time knocking on one another’s doors only to be disappointed when they don’t answer. We wait in vain on people to come to our doorstep, to pursue us, and we measure our worth by the frequency of knocks at the door.
Sometimes they don’t come. Sometimes all the wrong ones show up on our front porch. Either way, we miss something hugely important: the One who stands and knocks, softly, intentionally, lovingly, and passionately at our door 24/7. (See Revelation 3:20)
Jesus literally never tires of knocking. Ever. He passionately pursues us in a way the would make Mr Darcy look like an amateur.
“You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you…”
What if we allowed Jesus to tell us how ardently HE admires us?
Sadly, our culture values quantity over quality, we rarely allow relationships to root down deep, things get plucked up at the first sign of distress. We show up on doorsteps but rarely remain long enough to be invited in. Jesus not only knocks, but wants to come inside. He pursues, but He doesn’t come where He isn’t welcomed. Before we are able to give ourselves in friendship, marriage, parenting… we must get our worth from Him alone. Allowing Him to love us and pursue us is a sure-fire way to get filled up with what we really need. Then and only then are we free and capable to give it away.
“…anchoring our identity in the God who is obsessed with spending time with us makes us freely available to give grace to our friends who literally, humanly aren’t able to make themselves that kind of available.” Lisa Jo Baker
Friends, if we aren’t getting our worth from God, we are going to go crazy trying to get it from the world. Yes, we may be well ahead of some in certain areas, but there’s always something we are chasing as well. It’s a rat race with no end game and it will wear you out and choke out any relational roots that may be worth tending to.
Get filled up to fill others up. We all have doors to knock on and doors to answer. May we allow ourselves to be pursued and chased after by a God who holds in His hand gifts we could never imagine.
Into the Foolishness of God 
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