To be known and loved, is a wonderful place for a heart to reside, but those two truths can create a tension between a deep anxiety and an immense security. To be known is to be exposed, but is to also be heard. To be loved is to be accepted, cherished, protected. But love is not always unconditional and is sometimes undone by the exposure of our deepest insecurities, our most evil secrets and most painful traumas or injuries. Love has levels and not all love is equal. there is a true love that is available, yet because of the amount of cheap love we see, it’s almost hard to fully accept or believe. In response to this, my own instinct is often to put on my best face and share my best dreams. I try to only expose my traumas in ways that are palatable, and with grave explanation so as not to make myself seem to have any needs. I share my fears followed by the solutions because I don’t want people to think I am weak. I know a lot of good things and strive to live more freely, but we all are all still connected to the little versions of ourselves formed through the hurts and habits we acquired those many years ago with traumas repressed deeply in our subconscious memory. It’s hard to look into our most painful and most secure moments with equality of acceptance and see them both as worthy, but that is is the place we can start to become free; free from the critiques of the false self and striving to hide the uncomfortable and exaggerate what is holy.

It’s wonderful to see ourselves in secret, but deeper freedom is seen in the vulnerability of letting someone in on the deepest parts of you; to admit those parts to them and also to yourself, on record and out loud. Oh, how painful it is to open up wounds that have healed over on the surface that are killing you from the inside. Nevertheless, there is one that sticks closer than a brother, The Great Physician who knows your name, knows your pain. He hears you when you call, knows the source and is the cure. He asks us, but He asks you to come to Him in your weakness and heaviness of heart. He says He will give you rest. He fills you with peace that doesn’t make sense in your human understanding, and His love never ends.

To be fully known and fully loved is uncomfortable, because people fail us time and time again. There are rare people that I hope everyone has in their lives that show them a shadow of this type of full love. I want to be this type of person as I continue in lean into the security I find in friendship with Jesus. I find my anxiety shedding off, but there are flair ups, reactions when I place the weight of my value in the hands of someone who never asked to hold it. They don’t drop the ball of my self-worth because they want to drop it, but because the weight is more than they can carry.

I pray that I might some day find myself secure in the truth of my position before God, but until then, I will invite him into my anxious security.