He Is a King That Loves

A twenty year old told he was worthless described God better than most people who study Him.

I did a shopping trip today with three aged-out foster kids and an awesome chaperone. One of them was named Marcus.He was an amazing young man: quiet, shy, and gentle-spirited.

We were walking out to the car when I asked him where he had been between eighteen and twenty.

Group homes, he said. Then, in the flat voice of somebody reporting the weather, he told me the adults there were mean. That they told him he was worthless. That they told him he needed to leave.

He is twenty years old. He said it like it was a fact about the calendar.

I told him that no matter what he has heard about himself, God loves him. That he cannot build a life on other people's opinion of him. He has to rest in the opinion of the One who made him.

He stopped walking. Turned and looked at me.

"He is royalty," he said.

Yes, I said. He is royalty.

And then this young man, told by paid adults that he was worth nothing, said:

"He is a king that loves."

I have not been able to put that down all day.

Read it again slowly. He did not say God is a loving king. He said a king that loves. The loving is the verb. It is the thing the King does, not a quality He happens to possess.

That is chesed, and this kid found it without anyone handing him the word. Not affection. Not sentiment. Covenant loyalty that moves, that shows up, that spends itself on people who cannot repay it. The God of Sinai does not merely have compassion. He performs it. He goes down into Egypt. He hears. He comes.

The god most people hand a kid like him is a tolerant one. Distant, mildly disappointed, technically willing to forgive. He skipped past that entirely and landed on the God who acts.

I have studied this for years. He got there in a parking lot, out of a life engineered to teach him the opposite.

Every voice with authority over him told him he was worthless. He came out the other side describing a King who loves as a matter of what He does.

I do not have a lesson to attach to that. I am just carrying it. As I was driving back to my office, I was smiling, but my eyes welled up; I can't imagine what that kid has been through.

Thank you, Abba, for the opportunity to see a beautiful light that shines in a child who was raised alone in darkness.

Shalom