Yesterday morning, or perhaps it was Monday evening, I found myself in such a place again. Then I began thinking about creation. It occurred to me that the Jesus I've come to know would never be satisfied just to state that something was good or very good. He would also come down and take a look first hand. He would go to the edge of the river and investigate the otters' and beavers' newly built homes. He would walk across the sands and scurry up the sea cliffs. He would hold the miniature crabs and the tiny coloured stones in His hand. He would attend early morning birdsong choruses, to express His delight in person. He would lie down on the mossy forest floor and look up at a periwinkle blue shard of pre-dawn sky, and would call out "It is GOOD!" from a bottomless well of joy.
It was this last thing I was picturing Him doing, in fact, when He suddenly shattered my melancholy with a revelation and then a question.
It was before He even planned all this, my heart heard Him say, that He chose my name. Not the name I'm known by now, but the name He will call me by in eternity. Before He set creation in motion, He pictured the whole of my life -- the good and the bad, the wretchedness and the redemption. He knows what comes at the end of everything, and it will be worth it all. It was worth it, He even says, to have given Himself to be killed on a Roman cross, so that I might be His forever, to know every day of the rest of my life what it is to be perfectly, unrelentingly loved by the divine and all-glorious King.
Then He asked me a question: "Are you in?"
(What do you imagine I replied.)
Of course this story is not just His and mine. It's also His and yours. He sees the whole of your life -- pain and happiness and emptiness and all -- and asks the same question. Are you in? Is He worth it, whatever "it" turns out to be? Only you can answer.