For me, these questions do more than pique my interest. They embrace me like a straightjacket, demanding my attention and forcing introspection. I don’t side with either extreme of my fundamentalist roots, not any more at least. I don’t think God and Satan are both around the next corner, pushing and pulling cosmic influence in everything, even the stray pebble that dings my windshield and creates a spider web crack creeping across the glass. (”Was that God testing me or Satan trying to pulling me into a depression? They both know how much I love this car!”) Neither do I think the physical world is innately bad, rotten, unworthy or an enemy. Odd as this may sound, I take the Bible at face value when it says that God is working to redeem all things (not just people, all things—check out Romans 8:20-22) to himself. I think he wants to redeem the universe—our polluted mess, my cracked windshield, sex, the Swiss Alps, everything.

And frankly, when it comes to these questions about the nature of the world, our condition and God’s redemption, that’s the easy part. The hard part is believing that he wants to redeem me. Even more, that he has already started the process of redeeming me. I am a hopeless mess, I tell myself, and I can scarcely believe that God in all his goodness would take the time to pluck me out of the muck and the mire just to clean me off and set me back on solid ground. That he would do this because he likes me and because he wants to hang out with me absolutely blows my mind out the back of my head.

This is the thing I struggle to believe. Why would God care so much? Why do so much just to redeem me? Why doesn’t he just throw in the towel on me, frustrating and stubborn as I am?

I think this is the key thing about grace, though I cannot yet claim an understanding of it. I don’t think you can call what God does all that amazing until you understand just how crazy it is. I am one hell of a lost cause. That God would want to “redeem” a person who is basically already good, well, that just makes sense, right? Those are the kinds of people we all expect to be in on the Jesus thing anyway. But that God would go after losers, liars, thieves and scoundrels with just as much wild exuberance, treating the worse of this world like his special favorites, this confounds me.

And I’ll tell you something deeply personal: that God loves sinners is amazing to me, but as weird as that is, I can buy it. But that he loves me? Whoa. Stop the train. I’m not so sure about that.

This has long been the hardest single thing for me to believe—that God really does love me. All my life I’ve been trying to earn what he says I already have: his love and unconditional approval of me as a person. Not that he approves of everything I do, but that I approves of me. That when the Accuser puffs his chest and points his crooked finger at me and barks, “What about that one?” God calmly smiles and says, “Oh. Adam. He’s mine.”

All my life I’ve believed (inwardly—I would give you the “right” Bible answer if you asked) that this is something I have to achieve, that God would only defend me, only love me, only like me if I were a certain kind of person. A good person. And the thing is, I’m not. But I’m really good at being bad, and so all my life I’ve struggled to believe the “good news” I have not hesitated to preach to others. And it comes to this: I cannot claim to believe what I claim to believe if it’s not true for me, too. Either God is good and loving, or he’s not. Either grace wins the day or legalism does. Either God loves me right now, just as messy and broken as I am, or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, I’m screwed because I cannot help but be messy and broken. If he does, that’s the best news I could possibly hear.

I find myself yearning for a moment of eureka. I want to suddenly see it, you know? To have something click in my mind or in my heart and suddenly understand that God does me love and then just be happy. (Cue the cheesy, Jesus-feel-good music.) But that doesn’t happen and it’s not going to. Faith isn’t something you fall into, it’s something you climb into and it’s work.

I’m having to work hard these days. That’s the bad news. But I’m still working.