loved and chosen

I have the great pleasure to be re-reading Anne Lamott's book Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith for the I-don't-know-how-manyith-time, and I love it all over again. Especially beautiful and important to me is the thing her pastor Veronica told her: God is an adoptive parent, too. It is nice to know that with all our ugliness and pettiness and snarky thoughts about people who are clearly less adaptive and cultivated as we are, we are still loved and chosen, which is what Anne tells her Sunday School kids. It's good to be wanted. Everyone wants to be picked for a team, and not just placed because there are no more choices and it's time for the game to begin. So even in my most unlovely self, I am still loved and chosen. Anne also suggests that we try to see each other in our fullness and that if someone is particularly difficult or bent on self-destruction, then - to quote an old lady from her church - we should just leave them where Jesus flang them. But even then they - and we - are still loved and chosen. Sometimes we forget, and then we need to see that love and chosen-ness in someone being present and putting down those planks of  hope across the mud for us so we can make it to the other side. That's a miracle - that there are people there when we need them. That they are showing us that yes, indeed, we are loved and chosen.