In honor of my birthday today (43!!), I think about how wonderful it feels to have others delight in you. Perhaps it’s such a treasured experience because it reflects something beautiful and often overlooked about God: He delights in us.
Consider Deuteronomy 30:5 and God’s declaration that He will delight in His people, or Psalm 18 and how God rescues us because He delights in us. Consider, too, how God delights to show us mercy (Micah 7:18). Finally, I think about this today from Zephaniah 3:17.
“The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.”
Yesterday in our professor Bible study, we talked about how one way we might represent the love of God to our students and colleagues is to delight in them. What would it mean to live the kind of life that celebrates others, that declares to them how happy they make us, and to honor their lives? We might say, like a mentor once told me, “You are a delight.”
(This kind of statement buoys the heart. It fills up the discouraged, defeated soul who forgets she is a delight. I remember those words.)
Imagine running around this ordinary day and delighting in everyone you see. What a different day this now becomes!
I’ll take you by the hand, look into your beautiful face, and I’ll declare the truth: You are a delight.
Maybe someone needs to hear this today. Maybe someone in your life never had anyone delight in them. And now, you’re that someone who reflects the Someone who delights in us.