RECKLESS LOVE | KAIROS GLOBAL | AUGUST 2021

Author: Joan Martin

Intro: Texan teenager speaks about how she experienced reckless love from a forever faithful God.

Hey there! My name is Joan and I’m a 15-year-old high school teen from Texas who’s trying her best to figure out how to live life. 

I admit, when I was asked to write about my ‘experience’ for Kairos, I immediately laughed and thought to myself, ‘Why are they asking me? I’ve never had a life-changing experience with God. I’m just a struggling teen trying to get my prayer life AND my regular life together.’ Yet, here I am. I’m not going to lie; I’m still struggling to get my life together. 

Because of Covid and other things that are going on right now, being stuck at home has really taken a toll on my very social life, but especially on my prayer life. Before Covid started, I never had a problem in my prayer life. And although at times God wasn’t the number one priority in my life, by just attending church, prayer meetings, and youth groups, I had that connection with God and squeezed in a prayer whenever I could get time to talk with him. This had kept me going and kept me… alive. 

But when those trips to church and everywhere else stopped, I struggled to keep that flame of love for God burning. I slowly pushed God aside and focused on my responsibilities like school with the mindset, ‘I’ll worry about prayer later; God gave me responsibilities to take care of so he would want me to focus on completing them first. I’m sure he understands.’ I kept this up, and eventually, my prayer life died. 

Sure, I still ‘prayed’, but my love for God that I’ve always had since I was small, was gone. It started getting hard to read the Bible and pray for just five minutes. I hated myself for letting my spiritual life and my relationship with God slip by. This hatred for myself built up and I stopped seeing anything positive in my actions. It was really hard for me to forgive myself for all the magnified wrong actions I had committed. 

Since it was hard to pray, I started listening to Praise and Worship music, and I felt that God was talking to me through the lyrics. During this time, the idea of God’s reckless and ever-forgiving love kept coming back to me. I started to realise that God loved me for who I was and that he’s always waiting with arms wide open to embrace me as soon as I ask him for forgiveness. I admit, this idea of such reckless love and how God can simply just keep forgiving me for the limitless sins I have committed, has always puzzled me. But that’s the beauty of God’s love. It’s a mystery, but it proves that he’s faithful and always there. 

So dear readers, as I would like to remind myself, I hope you always remember that God’s love is unconditional and non-judgemental, and that whoever you are, whatever you’ve done, and whatever you think of yourself, he’ll always meet you wherever you are, and will find a way to bring you back. Never stop trusting in him like I did. He believes in you and so do I.

Joan Martin is a high-school student living in Texas, USA, with her parents and three younger brothers. She loves music, photography and spending time with her friends.