It’s almost one in the morning, and I’ve been crying.

Not the old kind. Not the kind that comes from resentment or self-pity or the wreckage I used to make. These were tears of joy, the kind that come up when something true hits you and you have no defense ready for it.

I was listening to Kim Walker-Smith give her testimony. She’s a worship leader, and somewhere about forty minutes into her message she stopped teaching and just started telling what happened to her. I sat there scrolling the transcript, reading along, and by the end I had to put the iPad down.

When she was a very little girl, her biological father said something about wishing he’d had a boy. She doesn’t even remember the exact words. She just remembers what she took from them: I was supposed to be a boy. I’m a mistake. And she carried that her whole life, all the way up to believing that God Himself had messed up when He made her. That she was a bad situation He was just trying to make the best of.

Then one night, in the middle of worship, falling into Jesus’ arms and sobbing, two questions came up in her that she was sure weren’t her own. How much do you love me? And, What were you thinking when you created me?

She didn’t want to ask. Of course she didn’t. She already knew the answer, or thought she did. Why ask a question when you’re certain it’ll confirm the worst thing you believe about yourself?

I know that place. I lived there a long time.

She finally worked up the courage and asked. And she says He just stretched His arms out wide, wider and wider, like Stretch Armstrong. That much.

She wasn’t a mistake. She was never a mistake. The pain had been telling her a lie her whole life, and God answered it in one moment without a lecture.

Here’s what happened in me while I listened. Everything else got quiet.

I wanted to love full time. Not as a project or a resolution, just as the obvious thing to do. Love started to look like the only real thing in the room, and everything I usually worry about started to look silly. Ridiculous, even. God is everywhere, always. Love covers everything. Peter says it plainly: “Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8).

Paul says it too, in a verse Kim closed with: “Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:8). I used to read that as a demand to give things up. Tonight it read more like a description. When the real thing shows up, everything else just gets obscured by it. You don’t have to push it away. It fades on its own.

And then I noticed something about the order.

When I know how loved I am, when I know how beautifully I was made, I want to value my wife. My kids. The guy in the meeting, the customer at the shop, everyone. I see my value, and then I see everyone else’s. It doesn’t work the other way around. I’ve tried. Trying to love people while privately believing I’m the mistake just turns love into effort, and effort runs out.

John had it right: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). First. That word is doing a lot of work.

23 years ago a loving pastor/mentor/friend asked me, “What does God think about you?” I’ve been chewing on that question ever since. Kim asked a version of the same question. It’s scary to ask, because you think you already know the answer. You don’t.

So where does truth come in? I’ve spent plenty of years swinging truth around like a wrench. Being right. Telling people what they needed to hear.

Paul says we grow up into Christ by “speaking the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15). I’m starting to think the order there isn’t an accident either. Love them first. Then the truth has somewhere to land. When truth comes first, people hear judgment, and honestly, a lot of the time that’s what it was. When love comes first, they already know they matter, so they can hear it.

And here’s the part that undoes me a little. If I love people, God gets the glory. Not because I’m good at it, but because it isn’t from me in the first place. Jesus said, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). People see the love first, and then they start wondering where it came from.

I suspect Kim’s pain ran deeper than what she shared in that hour. I’d bet on it. But she isn’t preaching from the pain anymore. She’s preaching from the arms that stretched out wider than she thought they could.

I don’t know how to live there full time yet. I lose it by Tuesday, usually.

But tonight I got to see it again. I want to ask the question she asked, and keep asking it, and let the answer change how I look at the next person I see.

What were You thinking when You made me?

I think I’m starting to hear the answer.