A little-known fact about me is that I was born for Broadway. Except for one small detail: I’m a pretty bad singer. So, unfortunately, my role as Spy #2 in the 2008 Fairview Elementary production of The Missing Lady (an original script written by our music teacher) seems to have been the peak of my theater career. (Note: Spy #2 was a bigger role than its title may suggest, just saying.)

However, I have not allowed my lack of talent to inhibit my love for the theater, and living in New York this summer presented me with the opportunity to see quite a few Broadway shows. Among these productions was the famed Dear Evan Hansen, which has received only six more Tony Awards than my beloved The Missing Lady.

Dear Evan Hansen is deep and emotional and complex. (Maybe slightly more so than The Missing Lady) The story is filled with honest and relatable characters, fantastic literary symbolism, and some great dance numbers. This musical is a high school English teacher’s paradise and there is so much I could dive into but I am not a high school English teacher so I will just highly recommend seeing the production for yourself and then silently meditating/journaling about it for an entire day.

However, I do want to talk about one particular scene, so I am going to do that. Without spoiling the plot, I will explain that Evan (the main character if you hadn’t guessed from the title) is a complex high school boy who struggles with a crop of mental health issues and makes some big mistakes throughout the musical. In one of the last scenes, his mother confronts him about what has happened and the following exchange occurs:

Evan: I lied. About…so many things. Not just Connor. Last summer. I just…I felt so alone…

Mom: You can tell me.

Evan: (Shakes his head) You’ll hate me.

Mom: Oh, Evan.

Evan: You should. If you knew what I tried to do. If you knew who I am how…broken I am.

Mom: I already know you. And I love you.

During this scene, the entire theater was silent. Tears were streaming down most people’s faces. I don’t think anyone breathed.

Since I saw the musical last week, I’ve been thinking a lot about this scene. The high school English teacher/therapist in me really wants to explore every aspect of every line but I will just say, how often do we have this conversation in our head? We believe we are broken, past the point of fixing, past the point of love. We are ashamed of what we’ve done, of who we are so we refuse to let anyone inside. We run and we hide and we lie, scared and ashamed of confronting this brokenness and what will happen when people know the real us.

And this fear isn’t something new. Didn’t Adam and Eve physically hide when they realized they had made a mistake by eating the forbidden fruit in the garden, literally covering themselves in fig leaves when they realized they were naked? (Yes, they did, check out Genesis 3 if you don’t believe me.) Since the beginning of humankind, we’ve been lying and hiding to cover our brokenness, putting on a happy face and pretending everything is okay. Because how could we possibly be lovable if the world knew who we really were? What we’ve really done?

I think this is a question everyone asks on the inside but nobody ever wants to vocalize, which is why this moment in the musical was so surreal. The scene that we don’t want to admit happens in our head was coming to life on stage. Tears were rolling because what was being said was immensely sad and immensely true for every person in that theater. I held my breath as Evan explained to his mom how she would hate him if she knew how broken he was because that’s a soundtrack that plays on repeat in my own head rather frequently.

And then his mom turns to him and says fiercely, “I already know you. And I love you.”

I already know you and I love you.

Our heavenly father, the creator of the universe, already knows us and he loves us. He already knows us and he loves us. How can this possibly be true? How could he love us broken, sinful people?

Because he does. Because we were fearfully and wonderfully made. Because, for reasons that surpass my understanding, God created us in his image and loves us more than we can fathom. He knows everything about us; everything we’ve done, and everything we will do. He loves us in our brokenness, no matter how dirty and unworthy we feel, no matter what mistakes we’ve made.

That’s not to say that God loves our sin. He doesn’t love the broken and messy things we’ve done, the ways we’ve hurt others and turned away from him. He hates the pain and injustice that are so present in our world and the inevitable sin that is so integral to our culture. God’s love for us is not permission for us to keep on sinning.

Rather, it is an invitation to shake off the shame and guilt of our sin, to step out from the cycle of self-hatred and fear that capture us and prohibit us from living our fullest lives. It is an invitation to accept the beauty of grace that leaves us unfathomably clean no matter how muddy the waters we've climbed through. Because when we come to the Father with all of our baggage, with our fear and our doubt and our shame, just like Evan’s mom, he looks at us and says, “I already know you. And I love you.”