Ever thought about what God gave up to have us? God made us in His image that He might have fellowship with us, and immediately lost us to our selfishness and sin. That means that God created a big hole in His heart for us and has been coming after us ever since.

Some people are uncomfortable with talking about God as needing anything, but there is simply no other way to think about this — that God created a deficiency in Himself for us to show us what love is like, and to what extent He would go to reclaim what is rightfully His. This doesn’t make God less than omniscient. Just because He knows how all this is going to go down doesn’t mean He doesn’t experience the pain associated with the process. Jesus knew He was going to die — knew that He was going to be forsaken by His Father — that doesn’t take anything away from His cry from the cross, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” If He knew the answer to that question, then why was it necessary to ask it? Because knowing it and experiencing it are two different things.

God knows what is going to happen to us, but He experiences both the loss of losing us and the joy of welcoming us back home like the prodigal son’s father. Here is the father, day after day staring down the road longing for the return of his son, feeling the hole in his heart, and when the news comes that he is coming up that road, the father can’t wait any longer and runs to meet him. I didn’t make that story up; Jesus did, and He told it to help us understand the Father God. Every part of it is true about God including the longing. Somehow this all-knowing, all-powerful God experiences the pain of losing and the joy of finding. Is this not the theme of human history — God creates us; God loses us; God goes to the ends of the earth (and hell itself) to get us back?

So why am I making such a big deal of this? Because we have clung so tightly to our theology of an omniscient God that we have missed what He put His heart through for us, and embedded in this reality is the knowledge of how valuable you and I are to Him. If there is a hole in the heart of each one of us that only God can fill, why is it so hard to imagine that there is a hole in the heart of God that only we can fill, and I mean that to be each one of us, individually? There is a (your name here)-shaped hole in the heart of God — a need that only you can fill. This makes worship a two-way street. When we worship God we are filling a place in His heart that only we can fill. Did you ever think you were that important?

One final thought: God created Eve out of a rib he took from Adam. Why did He do that if it wasn’t to show that love means losing part of yourself and needing to get it back to be whole again? And if that was necessary for Adam, why would it not be just as necessary for God to need us to complete what He took from Himself in making us? Is that not what love is like?

Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? (Matthew 6:26)