I was chatting with my firstborn last week about such light and fluffy subjects as “What God Thinks of Us”… I can’t remember, unfortunately, how exactly we got onto the subject. Though I think it has something to do with Romans Chapter 8. I’m working on memorizing it, so the boys are hearing it chanted out loud - A LOT. That has led to several quizzical looks and questions of “What does that mean?” I think I was explaining the flesh and the Spirit and how the flesh is corrupt and so without the Spirit we are, well, bad! 
Anyway, at some point in the discussion, my son said “Well yeah, but God thinks we’re wonderful anyway.”
I was a bit taken aback. “No….” I said carefully. “The Bible doesn’t say God thinks we’re wonderful. What does Romans 5:8 say?”
He dutifully repeated “But God demonstrates His own love for us in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”
“Exactly - He LOVED us while we were unsaved. But He didn’t think we were wonderful.”
This little exchange really got me thinking. First of all, I was wondering where he got that idea from. Was it from that VeggieTales tagline “God made you special and He loves you very much”? Was it all the modern self-esteem mumbo-jumbo that floats around in the air? 
I don’t know that it was really any of that. What hit me square between the eyes was that he thought that loving someone and thinking they were wonderful were the same thing. And as I mulled that over, I realized that I’ve been thinking that too! Isn’t that how love is portrayed constantly through movies, music, and books? Love is being besotted - thinking that the beloved is just so overwhelmingly fabulous. That everything he or she does is adorable, fascinating, charming, and practically perfect in every way. The goal - find someone that is, to you, so wonderful that you will always think he or she is wonderful - and if you at any point don’t think they’re wonderful…you must not be in love anymore and better go find someone else who is wonderful.
I have had LONG stretches of discontent in my married life because a) I didn’t think my husband was all that day-in-day-out wonderful and b) I knew for sure that he didn’t think I was all that wonderful either. After all, he wasn’t telling me I was wonderful. He didn’t look at me like I was wonderful. And besides, I live with me and I know all the reasons I’m NOT wonderful. He couldn’t possibly be overlooking all of those, so he couldn’t think I was wonderful, so therefore he did not love me enough.
Sound ridiculously immature and irrational to you? Yuh-huh. That’s how it sounds to me too.
We all know the phrase Love is a Verb…but it’s almost impossible to get away from the mindset that Love is a Feeling. And because deep, deep down I had the false equation that LOVE = “Thinking someone is wonderful”, I found it very hard to believe my husband loves me. And I struggled desperately to believe that God loved me. After all, nobody knows me better than God. I’ve never deluded myself into thinking I could hide anything from Him…so if I know I’m not wonderful, He really knows I’m not. Therefore….He couldn’t love me.
But Love is not a feeling. Love is not a thought. Love is not blind, as the poet says.
Love sees the truth and acts lovingly anyway. Love is patient and kind and forgiving and hopeful and enduring. Love is self-sacrificing. Human love is in the day-to-day, down in the trenches sticking together and laughing and crying and struggling together. Love is the glue that forms between two people as they walk through life together - even when some days they really want to run the other way. Love is that my husband doesn’t think I’m practically perfect, magically enchanting, or even all-that-wonderful…but he loves me anyway and comes home to me every night. (and sometimes maybe he does think I’m pretty cool - maybe a bit… 
)
And God? God sees me so clearly. God knows what I am, inside and out. And He sent His Son to suffer and die on a cross to buy me back from sin and death. It wasn’t because He thought I was wonderful, either. It was just because He Is Love and that’s what Love does.
Last week, I was reading The Complete Fairy Tales of George MacDonald. I never thought to be totally shredded by conviction from a fairy tale, but God is cool like that. I’ll write about the conviction some other time, but this little exchange near the end of the story brought the truth about the juxtaposition of God’s Love with His true view of the sinner.
The princess understood, and a flush of shame rose to her forehead. She turned to the wise woman and said:
“Will you forgive all my naughtiness, and all the trouble I have given you?”
“If I had not forgiven you, I would never have taken the trouble to punish you. If I had not loved you, do you think I would have carried you away in my cloak?”
“How could you love such an ugly, ill-tempered, rude, hateful little wretch?”
“I saw, through it all, what you were going to be,” said the wise woman, kissing her. “But remember you have yet only begun to be what I saw.”
God looks beyond our sinfulness, and He knows what He can make out of us. Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, mind you. I’m not saying that underneath our sin, we are still wonderful in ourselves and that’s why He loves us. No. There is no cause for self-satisfaction, or thinking I was somehow worthy to be saved. In myself, I am not. But God knows what He can do with me. He loved me, carried me away, covered me with the cloak of Christ’s blood, and began the long process of shaping me to His plan. When He’s done, I will be wonderful - but only because of Him, through Him, in Him, and for Him. Inasmuch as I reflect the WONDER that is God, I will be wonder-full.
1 John 4:10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.