no shame, only hope

Perfect love casts out fear. So if fear remains, there is something we aren’t understanding about perfect love. I don’t know if a full and complete understanding of perfect love is possible on this side of eternity, but we can certainly continue to examine the idols that dare to induce fear in the face of an almighty unconditional love. I think dating is a gradual opening up of your fears and your partner’s fears. And as the vulnerable parts of our hearts are exposed, we hope they are discovered with acceptance and love instead of criticism and rejection. 

Something that I think was particularly freeing for both of us was the sentiment of love without conditions. Arguably, unconditional love would make anyone feel safe, but for Kyle and me specifically, the way that it needed to be expressed was in the statement “I would love you and choose you even if you didn’t change.” Wrapped in that statement are also intentions like “you’re not too broken,” “you’re not impossible to love,” “I don’t wish for a better or different version of you,” and “you, as you are, are enough for me.” I’ll go back to the moment Kyle said that to me probably for the rest of my life as the moment that I was able to grasp what it means to be forgiven without the striving of a works-based salvation. 

Through him, God was telling me, as he’s told me countless times before, “I love you; you are enough.” I’ve always felt that I wasn’t enough, particularly, that I was never holy enough. 

As a pastor’s kid, I was always pressed to meet standards of holy conduct before understanding and accepting the grace that leads to holiness. And so the Gospel read to me as something I worked on and worked for and worked to be better at. It’s a weirdly subversive works-based salvation that tends to afflict the children of vocational ministers. We’re put under a lot of pressure to be good examples, good witnesses, good ambassadors of our parents and the Gospel they stand for. Instead of letting God be good, I was pressured to be good. Not only was there striving but also an (un)healthy dose of social expectation, especially in the Korean church context that I grew up in. With expectation, there is inevitable failure to meet that expectation, and, in the absence of an understanding of grace, there is shame. 

Without telling my whole life story, I think it’s fair to say that my greatest fear is of rejection that leads to shame due to my failure to meet a certain expectation. Dating isn’t a kind environment in which to dance around this fear. I dated on an off in college, and pretty much failed at godly relationship. I failed standards of health, happiness, leadership, community, and purity. And I carry a lot of shame around my story like a cloud. 

Before I met Kyle, I was in a relationship with a man who I thought was the one. He was different from all my college love interests. He was mature, established, and a youth pastor! I thought I had finally been accepted, I had finally experienced God’s redemptive grace. Even though I had fooled around in college, God brought me this wonderful Christian man who was everything I didn’t deserve. But when he heard my story, the extent of it horrified him. And after a few months of thinking about how imperfect I was and how I didn’t fit into his view of his own life, calling, and ministry, he rejected me. 

It was my greatest fear realized. 

After that relationship ended, there was this deep conviction in my heart: “No, I need to get this dating thing right, this singleness thing right, this purity thing right”––a list of things that I needed to get right––before I move forward, before I can meet God in a real way in my romantic relationships, before I can deserve a man who would love me unconditionally. 

Maybe God wouldn’t bless me if I didn’t get this right. 

And I know myself. I’m not perfect. I’ll never get it right. 

This train of thought and this way of living is depressing and stressful, and I felt that I was to live in this condemned state forever until Jesus would come at the end of days and free me. But one day, this very loud, very intelligent, cool Korean christian boy shows up in my life. 

This was Kyle. We fell into a bit of a mutually satisfying weirdness, if you will. He made it clear that he was into me, offering me an emotionally healthy, God-honoring, kingdom-oriented relationship. And I braved my own self-hatred to be in a relationship with him. But I was terrified. And I am terrified. And I reckon with that feeling every day. I fear that one day Kyle will wake up and realize that I’m dirtier, more broken than he thought, that I’m too emotional, that there are tons of better options out there, and that I am too difficult. But these fears don’t just reveal what I fear about a relationship with Kyle. I realized that they also reveal what I fear about love. Even love from God. Perhaps one day God will realize that I’m dirtier and more broken than he thought? That I’m too much of a handful? Too much effort? 

In an attempt to scare Kyle away, as a coping mechanism for my crippling shame, before our first date I let him know that I was emotionally unavailable, that I was not a clean slate, that I had tons of emotional baggage from previous relationships, and that he would be a rebound. If you couldn’t tell I’m a bit of an over-sharer. I thought that he would turn his face away from me, that he wouldn’t want to get to know me better, that he wouldn’t want to honor me, and that he wouldn’t desire relationship with me. But he didn’t even skip a beat. Kyle asked if I would let him walk with me into my baggage. He asked if I would allow him to speak truth of a Gospel love into the lies of rejection and unworthiness that bred my shame. He asked if I would let him be a part of my journey. And perhaps healing would arise on the way. He didn’t ask me to be perfect, he didn’t ask me to even have the potential for improvement. He just looked at me the way that Jesus looks at me. No expectations, no judgements, no shame. Only hope. 

Kyle was saying, joining his voice to Jesus’ voice, “I want a  relationship with you. I will go with you into your fears. I will go with you into the dark spaces of your heart. I will go with you into your sickness. I will go with you into your past. No matter how sick, how broken, how shamed you think you are, I love you.”