names we're given: beloved

Fall torches the hills 

orange and gold

speed shakes up through my feet

creation shouts 

with the voice of glory

"beloved." 

Curled up in the back seat, speeding home from my cousin's wedding, nose pressed against the glass drinking in the beauty.  "Holy Baptism and Contemporary Theology" by Herbert Vorgrimler, due for the class I didn't actually want to get back in time for, lay open on my lap, and I'm nerding out scrawling poems in the margins of my religious studies readings. 

For some reason, I really love this moment. I think I'm embracing the fact that I'm that nerd girl, scribbling fragmented sentences left over from the poems that occasionally hit me in the margins of my theology readings, teary eyed because God is just that beautiful. Also because I love roadtrips and speed and being with people I love, the coffee cup in my hand and the sweater cozy as I curled up. 

But the thing I truly love about that moment is that fact that I am learning to think of myself as beloved. I have struggled so much with my self-understanding, with how I identified at the core of who I am. And it is a beautiful miracle and I want to sing when I see what God has done, the change he's making in my heart. For so long the names I identified as were inadequate, flawed, unlovable, these whispers of hate and fear that I listened to over God's life shout of love. And I finally just begged him, around two years ago, to fight for my heart. 

And he did. And slowly and surely I have come to hear, see and touch his love, poured out in sunlight on water, in coffee cups and conversations with people who know my soul, in their love and their words of grace speaking God's great grace into my hungry heart, in fall leaves blazing scarlet and 730 graces counted, the mundane miraculous gifts that scream his love. And counting and hunting for these instances of his love has opened my eyes, and I count and count and how could all this love be for me? And how can I deny or talk down the power of this love? 

This love is redefining me. And I love that moment, the nerd girl curled up scribbling poetry, because her heart was singing with the love of God. Because this miracle where I'm not listening to the lies anymore, and I can finally hear behind all the grace and beauty God's voice, calling me, naming me, defining me.  Beloved.