“I’m so glad I have a daughter,” she holds me close. 

Her arms are home. 

But a week later, I unpack in my quiet apartment and I’m not sure if I was home or if this is home or if home will ever feel like home again. 

“Can you pray that I know the Lord loves me?” I ask her. I can’t think of anything else that matters. 

I lie on the grass and watch the evening light filter through the leaves overhead while I filter through the summer. The regrets. The blessings. The difficult texts I sent and received. The silence on the other end. The excitement in her voice when she told me the news. The disappointment in his voice when I told him the truth. 

I lie on the grass on a Monday night and I wonder how to broach the subject to Him. 

“Come as you are,” she had said to me over burgers and fries a few weeks earlier. “You don’t have to be clean first.” Silly religion gets in the way of vulnerability.

So, I sit on the grass and let time slip away. “Do you love me?” 

And her song comes through my earbuds and shakes me to my soul. Love like this. 

Funny how I often blushed, sitting in the back row at church, when we sang about His reckless love. 

Because the problem is not knowing whether He loves me, but having the courage to believe it. 

“You deserve to know yourself,” he tells me before summer. 

And that means seeing how I’m built and seeing how I’m broken and being able to live with that. 

Because He built me and sees how I’m broken and makes me fully alive.

And maybe knowing myself is discovering how He knows me. 

How He sees me.

How He lifts my head.

And for once on a Monday night, the sun shines brightly through the leaves overhead and the shame and regret and confusion from a summer I’ve just lived is not the truest, clearest thing. 

For once, I meet His gaze. Because looking away is not believing Him. Not really knowing Him.

How He loves me with abundance. And without exaggeration. 

“Do not be afraid,” I must tell myself every day. Because it takes courage to look in the eyes of Someone who knows you. And to see love–unreserved. 

“But you, O LORD, are a shield about me, my glory, and the lifter of my head.” Psalm 3:3