"What?" you say. "That can't be true. I'm not that good. I've messed up my life. God can't be that close to me."
But God's love for you doesn't depend on your so-called worthiness. God loved you first! God chose to live in your soul and still does. If you speak to God, God hears you.
What a miracle of grace! Jesus dwells inside you, in your soul. Jesus, Son of God, shines His amazing, light-filled gaze upon others through your eyes!
Have you ever looked into someone's eyes and seen so much love and compassion in them that you're blown away? It could be a relative or a friend. It could be a complete stranger. You're seeing God in them, loving you through them. God follows us through every day of our life in precisely this way.
Every time you give love, give honesty, give respect, you are reflecting the merciful Face of God to others. Because, doesn't God treat you with love? Doesn't God, through your conscience, honestly tell you when you're right and when you're wrong? Doesn't God treat you with respect, tell you you're His Precious Child, that you have dignity? How wonderful when you let others see that God is this way!
When you treat others with love, honesty, and respect, often they will treat you in exactly the same way. But, even if they don't, you have done what God asks you to do. Sometimes the honesty you have to deliver is a bitter pill for others to swallow, so you have to coat it in firm but kind love. You're not telling others this truth to hurt them. You're telling them the truth to wake them up and help them grow. You're giving them respect by treating them like adults. They may not like what they hear now, but you've planted the seed. Then you let God do the work of watering it, shining on it, helping the seed of truth to take root and grow in their souls.
Sometimes the hardest times that we're reflecting the Face and Voice of God is with our children. We reflect God's love to them, but they may not want God yet. Because sometimes God's love is a love that's more honest than they want to hear. Persevere. Don't back down. If we tell others the truth with love and respect, and then we trust in God, and ask God to please help us, God will always take it from there, in His own patient, gradual way and time. In the same slow patient way, He is helping us to reflect Him more and more brightly, in the Person of His Son Jesus, as we slowly become His image.
"We are Jesus Christ's. We belong to him. But, even more, we are increasingly him. He moves in and commandeers our hands and feet, requisitions our minds and tongues. We sense his rearranging: debris into the divine, pig's ear into silk purse. He repurposes bad decisions and squalid choices. Little by little, a new image emerges." - Max Lucado.
"In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also must love one another. No one has ever seen God. Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us, and His love is brought to perfection in us." 1 John 4: 10 - 12.)