One week from today I’m releasing a song called “You Love Me.” I’m super excited about it because not only is it super fun, but it’s so on point with my current (and hopefully longstanding) mission of love. I wrote it as a celebration of God’s amazing love and can’t wait to share it with you. Here are some lyrics:

Wasted another day just thinking about me / Time to put down the mirror and start looking around me / Suddenly the lights turn on and there’s so much to see / I’m surrounded by all the proof of how you feel about me / Love me, you love me / Can’t do much about it, I just want to shout it / You love me, love me / You took my heart, wrote your name upon it / Now I’ll never doubt it / That you love me

You’ll be able to hear it on all digital platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube, etc. I’ll also post it here for you to experience next week, duh.

As you can tell, I’m pretty blown away by the fact that God loves me, and I view every day as a new opportunity to learn more about how God loves me. I hope you are inspired and reminded that God loves you so much, too…just the way you are.

My most common prayer is: God, thank you so much for loving me. Perhaps I pray it so often cause I want to believe it, but mostly to remind myself what I do believe.

What’s your most common prayer?

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I made a post this past week on Facebook about how much God loves us and … well, here’s it is:

I choose to believe that God loves us so much. That includes you! It’s a supernatural kind of unconditional love that simply says, “I love you…and there’s nothing you can do about it, except to let yourself be loved.” This kind of love will free you from fear, shame, worry—and will free you to love—to love God in return (a simply thanks is a good place to start), love others, and (the biggie) love yourself.

You are loved just like you are. I’ll keep reminding you of that if you’d like.

Is God’s Love Too Good To Be True? Nope.

Some well-intentioned people will try to complicate God’s message of unconditional love by telling you that God has certain standards you are supposed to uphold…I guess to keep God happy with you? They want to make sure that you know simply being loved isn’t a license to live however you want to, that you need to get your act together and live God’s way, not the sinful way.

I get this, as I lived most of my life trying to follow all the rules, in order to make sure God loved me, rather than living out of a foundation of being loved. Let me try to dissect this a bit.

I believe God’s will is for all of us to live connected lives—to God, to others, and even within ourselves. The Christian concept of the Trinity is rooted in the belief that God actually exists in relationship. And we are invited into this relationship, to experience wholeness…or hol-i-ness.

There are things we do that can increase our connectedness and conversely, things we can do that cause disconnect…or make us feel disconnect. One of the worst feelings is a feeling of disconnectedness from God and other people. God offers a way for us to escape that feeling and experience life as intended, in relationship… in community.

But this all has to be rooted in the belief that we can actually never be disconnected from God—that, in fact, there is nothing we can do to separate ourselves from the love of God (quoting the apostle Paul in Romans 8:38-39). And this love…this unconditional, unfathomable love is what undergirds our efforts to increase our connectedness. Focusing on our behavior (and probably every one else’s behavior, too!) keeps our eyes on ourselves. It’s a self-idolatrous way of score-keeping that keeps being unconditionally loved always just out of reach. Ick.

When we live as connected people, eyes off of ourselves, we are compelled to care for each other. Life becomes less about me and what I can get out of life, and more about how can I help other people to thrive, to blossom, and see themselves as the glorious creations of God that they are.

I’ve heard many people discuss this, (and I just had a lengthy one with a good friend about this!) and it appears to me that organized religions like to say “God loves you, BUT… and God expects you to do certain things…OR ELSE!” To me, that isn’t love. Like I said, my behavior doesn’t change God’s love for me—though it absolutely will change my circumstances. I want to keep aiming for making choices that will afford me love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Decisions that let me feel connected to God and others, rather than separated. I believe that’s God’s will for me, too. When I follow God’s wisdom, this connectedness seems to happen.

Just FYI: You can stream/listen to all of my recorded music on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube. You can even ask Alexa to “play Mark Smeby music!” and usually she will do it. Beloved is my favorite album (all love songs), and The Messenger might be another good place to start your listening experience.