Two weeks ago I was sitting in a dark room at a leadership conference and Sarah Kroger was singing about belovedness and something landed in me that had been living only in my head for years.
Own your belovedness. Own it. Like a deed to a house that was already in your name.
I went home and looked up the Latin root. Dilectus. From diligo. It does not mean to feel warmly toward someone. It means to choose deliberately, to single out, to set apart at cost. This is not affection. This is election. And agapetos, the Greek word the Father uses at the Jordan before Jesus has done a single miracle, is from agape. The love that does not respond to the behavior of its object. The love that flows from the nature of the one who loves.
Beloved first. Mission second..
So when the Catechism says God willed the human person into existence for its own sake, not for what it produces, that is not a soft sentiment. That is a theological declaration that your existence is not instrumental. You are not a means to an end in God's economy. You are the point.
If that is true, and it is, then every time I lower my price before hitting publish, every time I post something and immediately start measuring my worth against the response, every time I over-explain myself on a sales call because the silence feels like rejection loading, I am living like it is not true. Not because I am faithless. Because my body has not caught up to what my head already knows.
That gap is the whole thing and it does not stay in your prayer life. It walks into your marriage, your friendships, your parenting, and it sits right down next to you every time you open a sales page.
In this week's episode I go deep on the etymology of the word, the neuroscience of why music carries truth somewhere a sermon sometimes cannot reach, what Father Ripperger said about demons and sanctification that I cannot stop thinking about, and what owning your belovedness actually changes in the way you price, sell, and show up.
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