Loved in Every Season: Experiencing Consistent Divine Love
Nadia was thirty seven when her marriage ended, her mother was diagnosed with early onset dementia, and she lost a job she had held for nine years, all within the same eight month stretch. Not one hard thing. Three. Stacked on top of each other like weights on a chest that was already struggling to breathe.
She did not announce her absence from church. She did not make a declaration or write a letter or have a conversation with her pastor. She just quietly stopped showing up. First one Sunday, then two, then before she fully realized what had happened, six months had gone by and the pew where she used to sit had learned to do without her.
She told herself she was just tired. Which was true. She told herself she needed space to process. Also true. But underneath both of those honest things was something she had a harder time admitting, even to herself.
She was not sure God still wanted her there.
Not after the divorce. Not after the anger she had aimed at heaven during the worst nights. Not after the prayers that had felt like they bounced off the ceiling and fell back to the floor unanswered. She had said some things to God in the dark that she would not have said to anyone else. Raw things. Desperate things. The kind of honesty that feels less like prayer and more like an argument.
And the silence that followed had felt, to Nadia, like an answer.
Her neighbor was a woman named Bette. Seventy one years old, small and sharp eyed, with a garden that was frankly impressive and an opinion about everything that she shared freely and without apology. Nadia had always liked her, in the way you like someone who never pretends to be anything other than exactly who they are.
Bette noticed the changes in Nadia the way neighbors who actually pay attention do. She noticed that the lights in Nadia's house stayed off longer in the mornings. She noticed that Nadia's car sat in the driveway on Sunday mornings now. She noticed that when they talked over the fence, Nadia smiled with her mouth but not the rest of her face.
One afternoon in early spring, Bette knocked on Nadia's door with a container of soup and no particular excuse for being there.
Nadia opened the door, surprised.
"You look like you could use something warm," Bette said simply, holding out the container. "And before you tell me you're fine, please know that I am seventy one years old and I have been fine before, so I know what it looks like. And honey, this is not it."
Nadia laughed, which she had not done properly in a while. She stepped back from the door and let Bette in.
They sat at the kitchen table and Nadia told her things she had not told anyone. About the divorce and the grief and the anger and the silence. About feeling like she had disqualified herself from something she used to belong to. About praying into what felt like an empty room.
Bette listened without interrupting, which Nadia had not expected. Then she wrapped both hands around her coffee mug and looked across the table.
"Can I tell you something I know for certain?" she asked.
Nadia nodded.
"God's love is not a reward for your best behavior," Bette said. "It is not something you earn in the good seasons and forfeit in the bad ones. It does not take a leave of absence when you fall apart. I know this because I fell apart once too. Completely. And He was there in every single piece of it."
Nadia looked down at the table.
"The silence you felt," Bette continued gently, "was not Him leaving. Sometimes it is just us, so broken and so loud inside our own heads, that we cannot hear what has been there the whole time."
There is a particular lie that grief and shame like to tell together. They whisper that love is conditional. That it has a threshold. That there is a version of you, messy enough, broken enough, angry enough, that finally exhausts the patience of the people who care about you, including God.
It is a convincing lie. Especially when life has handed you evidence that human love can, in fact, run out. When people have left. When support dried up. When the phone stopped ringing. It is easy to project all of that onto God and assume He operates the same way.
But He does not.
Romans 8:38-39 is one of those passages that deserves to be read slowly, out loud, more than once: "For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Read that list again. It is exhaustive on purpose. Paul was not being poetic for the sake of it. He was closing every exit. Every loophole. Every scenario the anxious and grieving heart might construct to talk itself out of being loved.
Divorce did not make that list. Job loss did not make that list. Anger directed at heaven in the middle of the night did not make that list. Because none of those things, not one, has the power to separate you from a love that was decided before you were born and has not wavered a single day since.
That is not a seasonal love. That is not a fair weather love. That is a love that shows up with soup on a Tuesday afternoon and sits at your kitchen table and tells you the truth.
Nadia went back to church on a Sunday in April.
She almost talked herself out of it twice on the drive over. She sat in the parking lot for four minutes before getting out of the car. She chose a seat near the back, just in case she needed to leave without making it a thing.
She did not need to leave.
The worship team was playing a song she had not heard before, something about being held through the storm, and somewhere in the second verse Nadia felt something shift in her chest. Not dramatically. Not the way it happens in movies. It was quieter than that. More like something that had been clenched for a very long time slowly, carefully releasing.
She did not cry, which surprised her. She just breathed. Deeply and slowly, the way you breathe when a weight you forgot you were carrying gets set down somewhere.
After the service, her pastor's wife found her near the door. Not with fanfare or a big welcome back speech. Just a hand on her arm and a quiet, "We missed you. I'm glad you're here."
Six words. Nadia held onto them the whole drive home.
Her mother's dementia progressed, as it does. There were hard days and harder days and days that required a kind of strength Nadia had to borrow from somewhere beyond herself. But she stopped borrowing it from an empty account. She went back to the Source. She went back to the Word. She went back to the community that had kept her seat warm, even when she was not in it.
And on the days when doubt crept back, as it sometimes still did, she would pull out a small notecard that Bette had written for her after that kitchen table conversation. On it, in Bette's slightly shaky but very deliberate handwriting, were just two lines:
He loved you before you had anything to offer. He loves you still. Especially now.
Nadia kept that card in her Bible. She had read it more times than she could count.
It never stopped being true.
A Word for You Today:
Whatever season you are in right now, whether it is a season of joy or a season of survival, whether you feel close to God or so far away that you cannot imagine the distance closing: His love has not changed. Not one degree. Not one moment.
You did not earn it on your best day. You cannot lose it on your worst. It is not contingent on your church attendance or your consistency or your ability to hold yourself together. It is rooted in His character, not your performance. And His character does not waver.
If you have been staying away because you feel like too much of a mess to show up: please hear this. The mess is not a disqualifier. It is an invitation. Come as you are, because who you are is someone deeply, completely, unshakeably loved.
He is not waiting for you to get it together. He is waiting for you at the table, with something warm, ready to sit with you in every single piece of it.
Every season. Every version of you. Loved.
"I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness." Jeremiah 31:3
Written for RLF Faith Space. Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that they are still loved.
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