The next entry for my Blog is Who I Thought You Were, which was written by Olivia Lane, Jacob Stanifer, and Dustin Lolli. It was first released April 26, 2024. A link to Olivia Lane singing the song is at the bottom of the Blog.
Yeah, they told me that you loved me, then they told me to toe the line
They said I should be scared of doing things I know you don’t like
Saying sorry every day
Cuz I was so afraid
That’d you leave me so I left you chasing dreams I never found
But through these tears here on my knees I’m begging you to come around
Then the God I learned to fear
You showed up and made it clear that
You were there in the darkness
You were there in my pain
You saw me in the valleys and still loved me anyways
It’s so nice to finally meet you
Why was I so afraid?
I have so much left to learn
But thank God you’re not who I thought you were
I always thought you’d be so angry, instead you’re patient and you’re kind
You are for me, not against me, for way too long I believed the lie
That there was only so much grace
But now I can finally say that
You were there in the darkness
You were there in my pain
You saw me in the valleys and still loved me anyways
It’s so nice to finally to meet you
Why was I so afraid?
I have so much left to learn
But thank God you’re not
Way too holy to want the broken
Way too proud to love the meek
Cuz now I know that what I fear
Is not having you with me cuz
You were there in the darkness
You were there in my pain
You saw me in the valleys and still loved me anyways
It’s so nice to finally to meet you
Why was I so afraid?
I have so much left to learn
But thank God you’re not who I thought you were
Who is God? What is God’s personality? Is God really a being full of wrath who is always threatening the world? It seems as if we frequently see God depicted as a being looking down on our world with a look of anger on his face and carrying a spear or trident, similar to a Neptune or Zeus image. Many people strongly believe that God is a vindictive being who has no tolerance for those who do not love him. In the past, there have been some teachers and preachers who tried to scare people into accepting God and they started to fear God instead of loving him.
On the other hand, people tell us how God is filled with love and compassion. So, which personality does God have? Should we be afraid of his anger, should we try to run and hide from him, or should we open our eyes, ears, and heart to his love? With all of the dimensions in God’s perceived personality, we get the feeling that we constantly fail God and need to apologize to him continuously since we all fail in some way every day. It is almost as if we are afraid to love him and also afraid to run away from him. Once we decide to love him, our greatest fear becomes disappointing God and being abandoned, no matter how scared we may be of him. We finally realize just how much he loves us.
I realize this is a quite a gloomy perspective to start this song, but I truly believe that many people live in a fear of a powerful God instead of living in the love that only God can give. This song tells us how people turn from God out of fear instead of running to his love. Once we begin to realize that God is on our side and stands with arms open wide, we come to him on our knees. We realize that in the darkest days of our life, God was there. When we thought we were alone and lost, God was there beside us all the time. It is almost as if we find that long last friend who we had been around for most of our life; we just never realized what they meant to us. Once we realize that we were acting all of our lives in poor judgement, we can’t believe how much we were loved and cared for during every day of our life. We reach a point where we can finally say, “I am so glad I met you and so happy to understand that I could not have lived my life without you.” In the book of Romans 5:8-9, we are told that God sacrificed his only son so that we could spend eternity with him. All he asks of us is that we accept the sacrifice he made. “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.” Let this scripture sink in for a moment and think about whether you would be willing to pay this steep of a price for someone else.
Even though it took us so long to realize how we had misjudged God, he was never angry with us, he was never going to desert us; he always stood there beside us with his arms spread wide. He doesn’t hold our past against us, he wasn’t angry with us, he was not judging us; he was just waiting for us. This reminds me of a song “He Was There All the Time”, which was released back in 1988. You can read about this song in my Blog since it was one of my earlier posts. God started loving us before we were born and he holds no grudges against us. He loves us all, it doesn’t matter if we once hated him, ignored him, or rejected him. He even tells us in Psalm 103:12 that our past and our sins are no longer in his sight, “How far has the LORD taken our sins from us? Farther than the distance from east to west!” Even though God is perfect in every way, he accepts us just as we are. He goes from someone we fear to someone we love and can’t live without. Isn’t it amazing that we can have someone in our lives that will always love us and never fail us? We have no debt to pay to God, we only need to fall into his arms and thank him for not being the God we thought he was.