Loved As We Are

When I first stepped into a church, it was because a childhood friend invited me. I remember feeling like an outsider the whole time. I didn’t know the words to the songs, the rhythm of when to sit and stand, or the quiet codes everyone else seemed fluent in. I went a few other times with different friends, but I always walked away thinking, this isn’t for me.

And yet, something caught my attention every time: the replica of the man suffering on the cross. I was drawn to him in a way I couldn’t explain. Around my tenth birthday, my mom entrusted me with a relic of my Greek heritage from my father’s side — a traditional Greek Orthodox crucifix. My mother never really spoke about God or church with me growing up; I think she saw that cross more as a token of cultural identity than as the true heritage it pointed to. But for me, it became a treasure. Finally, I had my own trinket of the man on the cross, the one I had been drawn to in those churches I didn’t understand.

It’s a strange introduction to faith, isn’t it? Feeling the edges before you ever glimpse the center. But those early brushes planted something: I knew what it felt like to be on the margins. And years later, when I actually encountered Jesus, it wasn’t through church culture. It was in the quiet, in the recognition that God’s love had already found me.

That love wasn’t conditional. It didn’t come with fine print. It didn’t say, “fix yourself first.” It was simply there — steady, present, waiting to be trusted.

Eunuchs and the Arc of God’s Embrace

The Bible tells a story about eunuchs — people whose bodies and lives didn’t fit the cultural categories of their time. In the ancient world, eunuchs often served in royal courts. They were considered “safe” around women and entrusted with positions of influence, but their difference marked them as permanently “other.”

Deuteronomy excluded them from full participation in worship: “No one who has been emasculated… may enter the assembly of the Lord” (Deut. 23:1). To be a eunuch was to live with rejection etched into your body. They could serve kings, but not belong among God’s people. They were both useful and unwanted, trusted yet untouchable.

And then, centuries later, Isaiah speaks a radical word:“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant — to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters” (Isa. 56:4–5).

The very thing they lacked — children, legacy, a name carried forward — God promises to give them better than sons and daughters. What society erased, God engraved.

The arc continues in Acts 8. An Ethiopian eunuch — a foreigner, a sexual minority, a religious outsider — is riding in his chariot, reading Isaiah. The Spirit nudges Philip to approach him. They talk scripture, they talk Jesus, and when they come to water, the eunuch asks, “What can stand in the way of my being baptized?”

The answer is: nothing. Philip baptizes him then and there. No conditions. No hesitation.

The first recorded non-Jewish convert in Acts is an Ethiopian eunuch — triply marginalized. The circle widens again. And here’s the point we can’t miss: the eunuch did not stop being a eunuch. They were still themselves — and yet fully accepted, baptized, and named beloved by the God of Jacob.

Always Widening the Circle

Jesus himself kept stretching the circle wider: touching the unclean, eating with outcasts, dignifying women and children, and making room for those written off. Again and again, the message was the same: you belong, because God’s love is bigger than the rules keeping you out.

It’s easy to forget that in a world that craves neat and tidy categories. Some still say, “you can’t belong unless you fit our definition.” But my life, my marriage, my family — they tell a different story. They show me what I’ve learned firsthand: that love grows best where it is trusted, not where it is feared.

Fred Rogers used to say that the way to change a child is to love them exactly as they are. I think that’s just as true for adults. It’s also true for churches. Transformation is never the price of admission — it’s the fruit of being loved and welcomed in the first place.

I wasn’t raised in church, but I was raised by grace. And if there’s one thing I’ve come to believe, it’s this: God is always at work moving us from exclusion to embrace. Always widening the circle. Always loving us first, just as we are. Any change comes first through unconditional  love.

Reflection

- When have you most felt like an outsider, and what would it look like for someone to welcome you there, exactly as you are?

- How does the story of the eunuch in Isaiah and Acts change the way you imagine God’s household?

Thank you, God, for loving me and welcoming just as I am; it inspires me to learn to be more like You in every way.

Amen.