The deep love of Jesus, the kind that makes no earthly sense at all, is what compels me to write each morning.  My spiritual journey didn’t have a pretty beginning. I was never a little orphan girl, all dressed up and on good behavior.  I was undesirable.   I was lost before I was rescued.  Here’s how Ezekiel captured it. 

On the day that you were born, your umbilical cord was not cut, you weren’t bathed and cleaned up, you weren’t rubbed with salt, you weren’t wrapped in a baby blanket.  No one cared for you.  No one did one thing to care for you tenderly in these ways.  You were thrown out into a vacant lot and left there, dirty and unwashed – a newborn nobody wanted.  And then I came by.  I saw you all miserable and bloody.  I said to you, lying there and helpless and filthy, “Live!”  I took care of you, dressed you, and protected you.  I promised you my love and entered the covenant of marriage with you.  I, God, the Master, gave my word.  You became mine.  Ezekiel 16  THE MESSAGE

The ‘field’ is Satan’s ‘field of the unwanted’.  Newborns aren’t treasured in his wasteland of a kingdom.  He wants them because he doesn’t want God to have them.  They are dirty trophies, uncared for, bloody, un-swaddled, and languishing.  He will raise them on filth, a degrading kind of diet for those who will never know one moment of nurturing until they are rescued by LOVE.

Look at the intervention.  God saw the births.  Saw the discarded newborns, unable to do one thing for themselves.  Their umbilical cords were still uncut and rotting.  His reaction was not revulsion; it was compassion.  He spread His cloak over them, wrapped them up, and called them His.  “Live!” He spoke over them.  

This is the Gospel.  These were my beginnings.  God did it all.  Even though I was raised in a respectable, church-going family, presumed goodness begged to get in the way of seeing myself as a daughter of the darkness, in need of a Savior.  Unless I embrace the truth of who I once was, I will never respond with the depth of love that is possible for me to feel and then to express in worship.  This is what it is to be a Daughter of Promise.