Lose Me to Love You

I don’t know about you, but a little something I’ve started looking forward to each year around this time is my Spotify Wrapped– basically a summery of what songs I listened to and who I listened to over the past year.

To my complete shock, the song that I apparently played the most in 2020 was Lose You to Love Me, by Selena Gomez. I mostly play contemporary Christian music, but I also dapple in pop and random other genres that people recommend. Yet this surprised me because I hadn’t listened to this song since sometime last spring. But reflecting on the title and the concept caused me to think for a minute.

I think that in many ways, one of the biggest things I learned in 2020 was summed up in the title “Lose You to Love Me”. Throughout the year, I realized that it’s okay to be misunderstood for my faith and my uniqueness. It’s okay to not be liked by everyone I meet. It’s okay to stand out sometimes. And most importantly, it’s okay to not live up to other people’s expectations. The only one who should define us is God. Ultimately, the only ones we will have at the end will be God and ourselves. We can’t fully love others until we invest that same energy in appreciating ourselves and recognizing how we are made in God’s image.

But an even more important lesson I learned was in the reverse of this title. I learned to lose me to love God. I have always wanted to be in control, but this year more than ever did I realize in order to fully trust God, I have to let go of my own plans in order to accept where He was leading me. Sometimes we get so caught up in the day-to-day that we forget that God has an even bigger plan for us. When we get fixated on just what we can see, we lose our faith. For faith is not in the seen, but is assurance of what we do not see.

I think 2020 is a year in which we’ve all needed a lot of faith. Whether it’s been having faith in a God that’s still good despite all the civil unrest, tragedies, and uncertainties, to wondering what is to come in the future. But before COVID and all that has defined 2020 for many of us, I wrote down as my word of the year a word that many may not associate with how this year’s been– hope.

My translation of the definition of faith that used the word assurance (which was taken from the Bible) in some translations is actually the word hope. Faith is not some wishful thinking type of hope. Faith is hoping with complete confidence that God will restore our lives and use us according to His purpose.

It’s definitely been a strange year. But I’ve noticed more than ever before that God is working in mysterious ways that we can’t even comprehend. So today, whether you are feeling discouraged by the weight of the world or how this year may have disappointed you, remember that we can still have faith. We can still have hope.

But we can only feel free of worry when we lose ourselves and our failures, disappointments, and concerns by focusing on what is never changing– our loving relationship with God.

And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.

Hebrews 11:6

And Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

Mark 11:22-24

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Hebrews 11:1