A Word of Encouragement from Elizabeth Rice Handford
“Nobody wants me,” a distraught woman said to me as she opened the door to me. “God doesn’t even want me.” How deeper could a human being’s despair go? This dear woman had found life intolerable, and thought she’d find relief in death. But she was found in time to save her life. She wasn’t grateful. She felt God had rejected her, too.
My husband and I were chaplains with Interim Health Care. The woman’s social worker asked me to visit her. She was struggling with major medical problems as a result of her suicide attempt. She was blind in one eye because in her comatose condition her little dog had tried frantically to awaken her by licking her eye. When she was out of danger, her brother brought her to his home. He loved her and was doing everything he knew to do to comfort her, but she was inconsolable.
She greeted me at the door, already in tears. “I thought I could get out of this miserable mess by going to God, but even God didn’t want me,” she said again. If no one on earth cared about you, and even God didn’t want you, life really would be intolerable. Yet too many of us, even Christians, sometimes struggle with the feeling that God doesn’t really care about us. Life is hard. We wouldn’t consider suicide—we’re “too good a Christian” to do that, but life sometimes seems tedious and burdensome beyond endurance. The Christmas season may be particularly depressing. But the Bible says God loves human beings with “everlasting” love. Jeremiah 31:3 says:
The LORD has appeared of old to me, saying,
Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love;
Therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you.
The events of Christmas especially demonstrate the everlasting love of God for you. Consider: I think of myself as a loving person, but I can’t imagine a circumstance where I would be willing to give up my child to die for someone else. Yet God gladly gave His Only Begotten Son Jesus to die, not for good people, but for wicked people who hated Him. Take into account that this is the God who is all powerful, all sufficient, all wise, the incomparable Creator of this remarkable universe. There is nothing He could not do should He decide to do it. But that holy God gave His beloved Son to die a criminal’s death in agony, only because He loves you that much!
Don’t let your familiarity with John 3:16,17 dull its astonishing truth:
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son,
that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world,
but that the world through Him might be saved.
Precious truth! God was so eager for that sad woman to spend eternity with Him, with all her sins forgiven, that He saved her life, and sent her back to hear the blessed Gospel and so come to trust Him for eternal life. Oh, yes! He wanted her to be with Him forever. As that truth soaked into her ravaged heart, she at last knew how very much God really did love her.
If you, too, feel oppressed and unloved, oh, open your heart to the everlasting love that God so passionately wants you to receive.