Right Now, You Like Me

When Sally Field won the Oscar for Best Actress in 1985, she gushed out a heartfelt and earnest acceptance speech, where she spilled to the Academy, "...and I can't deny the fact that you like me! Right now, you like me!" People have made fun of that speech for decades, but when you look at her bubbling those words out in unbridled catharsis, what strikes you is how excited and energized she seems at the reality that right now, she is liked.

I've said before that my new perspective is that the worst thing in the world is to be alone. And I think that I've always believed that God loves me, but only recently have I considered that He likes me. In the recesses of my head, I guess I'd always accepted that Christ died for us sinners because He loved us, which meant because God is love and because it was the right thing to do. God loves me? Of course He does -- that's the awesome thing about God, He saved a wretch like me, He can love people who are as messed up as you and me! But the idea that God would enjoy my company, that He would look at me and see the best in me and think that what happened in my life was actually important? Big Idea, the type that shifts your paradigm with a clutch.

But it is definitely true that to love someone best, you have to learn to like them. It's been true in my relationship with my girlfriend, with my family, with my other friends -- I haven't begun to love them well until I begin to see the best about them. And it's not that I have to deny that they have flaws or undesirable attributes, but I think that if I love them, then I will focus on the most beautiful aspects about them. You can only love out of principle for so long, and even though it is sometimes difficult and sometimes a sacrifice, you can't wake up every day and think that you are going to love an ugly person because God said to. At a certain point, if you really love them, you will begin to consider them beautiful. You will find a way.

At the top of this post are two versions of a photograph of the swamp at Cypress Gardens in South Carolina. When I take photos these days, I edit them slightly using Microsoft Picture Manager, which is like the Microsoft Paint of photo-editing. The one on bottom is the one that my camera captured initially; the one on top is the one where I took the time to highlight what I considered its best attributes, particularly the contrast between the light and dark lines in the image. I helped create that photo by seeing a particularly striking image in my mind and capturing it. I saw something worthwhile and beautiful in that picture, and I took the time and effort to highlight its beauty, to make it as significant as I could. If that pattern sounds familiar, it's because you already know that God created us in His image, that He saw that we were good, and that the closer we come to God's perspective of love, the more we see the best and most beautiful attributes in the people around us. It's not that I'm distorting the images from their true form; I'm simply pointing out the best that they have to offer.

In Searching for God Knows What, Don Miller observes, "I kept wondering about the people who met Christ who were losers in the lifeboat, the crippled and the blind, the woman at the well, Mary Magdalene and Zacchaeus. Entire communities shunned them and told them they were no good, but God, the King of the universe, comes walking down the street and looks them in the eye, holds their hand, embraces them, eats at their tables, in their homes, for all the world to see. That must have been the greatest moment of their lives."

When God came and died for us, He did it because He so loved the world. We shouldn't take it to mean that we did anything to deserve it. But if we believe that God isn't an idiot, then we should really be struck with the devastating truth that God likes us enough to think that we're worth it.