I’m Nothin’ Till Somethin’ Loves Me

When I was a teenager, my sister Polly, a year and a half older than I, made this philosophical statement: “Everyone is basically insecure.” I accepted it as fact; never questioned it. The wisdom of her age was worthy of my respect.

I still think her observation is true, except now I might qualify it by saying “almost” at the beginning of the sentence. I have to allow for exceptions, because my husband is very secure, and he says he has always been that way. “It’s because,” he explains, “I always knew I was loved.” Throughout his childhood, he felt free at any time to go and hug his mom and bury his face in her ample waistline, no matter what she was busy with.

Something else that happened when I was a teenager: a girlfriend gave me a gift on my birthday, a figurine, a woebegone little fellow with a soft shock of synthetic, black hair. He held a sign that read, “I’m Nothin’ Till Somethin’ Loves Me.” I always liked that little guy, and I kept him for a long time.

When I was 24, God revealed His great love to me and my life was forever changed. His love made the difference. Now when I looked at that little guy, I thought of the love of God. I had begun to study the Bible faithfully, the King James Version, and one day I came across Romans 5:8: “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” If that little guy was asking a question, here was the answer.                   

I spent some time musing on this subject in an unpublished manuscript called Marriage by Faith:

We all have a need to know we are loved…. We all need to be in relationship with others, whether in marriage, in meaningful friendships, or in community. And yet I believe that, for most of us, the default setting with which we were born tells us subliminally that we are unlovable and alone.

Unlovable and alone.

I believe this is a reflection of what came down to us through Adam from the Fall. No matter what our belief system or lack thereof, there is an overshadowing uneasiness, a feeling of unworthiness, a deep loneliness, a sense of abandonment, a fear of never quite measuring up.

It’s not that God has left us alone: remember, He came after Adam and Eve, calling to them, “Where are you?” But the separation caused by Adam’s choice to act independently of God left a genetic stamp of isolation on all of us.

This is what is so vital about the mystery of Christ dying on the Cross. In this unfathomable provision, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19). Ever since, reconciliation has been an established fact for the whole world; it only remains for each of us to understand that and accept it. Until we do, this deep sense of isolation pervades and prevails. It is a measure of our true state.

When we are reconciled, individually, to God, we find tremendous relief from that loneliness, and we know without a doubt that we are deeply loved. But as we grow in God, we find that we don’t stay in that easy place of security; rather, that God is continually at work, stripping off layer after layer of wounding and demonic lies and accusations, to render us able to truly enter in to the security of His love.

Speculating on the thoughts above, I was intrigued to come across a quote of C.S. Lewis that addresses the same thing:

“Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache” (The Weight of Glory).

I’ve been reading a book called More by Todd Wilson. He tells the story of a beautiful golden retriever they had. Initially obedient and compliant, she began to chew up carpets and furniture while they were away at work. When they finally went to a vet for help,

The veterinarian quickly diagnosed the problem. Separation anxiety. … (A)lone and isolated… (h)er loneliness overflowed into bad behavior.… (D)eep longings to be returned to her master … produced unhealthy behaviors.

He then draws a parallel between that dog and us.

We are all born with a form of separation anxiety. The quiet, persistent, often unrecognized gnawing of the pain of separation from our heavenly Father produces equally unhealthy behaviors in each of us” (Page 34).

“I’m nothin’ till somethin’ loves me,” said the little guy with the sad face. Twenty-five years after he was given to me, I had a friend make me a plaque with a platform for him to stand on. Because his message now seemed incomplete without the quote from Romans, I had her inscribe it above his head: “God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” I loved the message it proclaimed: our problem and the solution.

   

But one year when we were between homes, a shed in which we were storing our belongings was broken into and a lot of things went missing, including that dear little guy. The plaque was still there, however. For years I kept my eyes open for a figurine that could replace him. 

Then one day in a dollar store, I saw a statuette of a little girl that fit the bill. For a toonie, she was mine. I made her a new sign and set her up on the plaque, on the wall in our main floor bathroom, where visitors could contemplate her and her message in private.

But the glue I used to fix her in place was weak. The day came when Greg bumped the little girl and she broke loose, fell, and hit the ceramic floor, knocking a large hole in her skirt. Some days later, I painstakingly glued the pieces back, one by one, into her dress. But some of the bits had gone missing; even once I had replaced every piece Greg had salvaged, there was still a hole left. The sign she holds covers it nicely, though, and I think the evidence of “the fall” is fittingly symbolic. We have all been hurt and damaged. However, once we have found the love of God, the scars are no longer signs of brokenness but, rather, proof of our healing.