Just the Way You Are - Guest Blog by Nate Wessley

"I like you just the way you are". Our kind, compassionate, television neighbor Fred Rogers coined that phrase and if you are anything like me you longed to hear that from somebody, anybody most of your life.

You see, so many of us live shackled, incarcerated really, by a world that screams "You aren't good enough.  Your quirks aren't okay. You don't fit the mold. You'll never measure up." This message is prevalent in our culture through television, billboards, magazines and especially social media.  What it does is it leaves us scrambling. Scrambling to hide. Scrambling to pose.  Scrambling to become the person we create that we believe the world actually would like. Scrambling for masks to hide behind.

This is where so many people live....and it's the space I lived in for many, many years. For me, I have a whole laundry list of reasons for Jesus not to like me. I spent many years as an alcoholic (11 years in recovery now PTL), a drug user, a liar, a thief, on the run from God....the list goes on and on. Although later in life I was wooed by God's reckless love and saved from my sin, I never really believed He liked me. The fact was that I knew from a young age that He loved me. He has to, right? I mean, "for the Bible tells me so" isn't merely a cute nursery rhyme for kids, it's gospel truth. But what I really struggled with is could He actually like me...for me? Through all the faults, mistakes, failures, and sin. How could He possibly like someone like that? 

All of this led to a point of having a reckoning of sorts with Jesus Himself because if He couldn't like me for me....no one really could. After wrestling and agonizing over that question for entirely too many years I can tell you God has revealed the answer to my heart and I want to share it with you. 

Now lean in for this. If you catch nothing else from my rambling please catch this. He likes us in spite of our failure. He doesn't define us by our shortcomings but defines us by who He created us to be. Our identity isn't wrapped up in the mounds of shame we bury ourselves in, but it is found in His perfect design when He created us. He not only likes us, but He's absolutely wild about who we are at our core.

“Why?” you might ask. Why and how could anybody, especially God like a person like me?  Because He made you exactly the way He wanted you to be! Every quirk, every awkwardness, every detail of your looks, every single thing about how you were specifically made came from Him. How could He not like you? And how could He like me? And how could He not look at us with a genuine fondness and affection when we walk out the way He divinely wired us?

So today I want to encourage you to stop hiding, stop posing, and burn the metaphorical mask you've constructed to hide behind. I promise that when you do you'll not only find freedom from your prison but absolute acceptance from Jesus Himself. And if you stop for long enough and listen hard enough you just might hear Him whisper gently to you as he has to me so many times since that reckoning, "I like you just the way you are".

Psalm 139:13,14 - For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.