loving on people, part II

If aside from loving God, the ultimate human experience is achieved through loving, healthy relationships with believers, what happens when these relationships don't work out? What happens when you go about them in this twisted, backwards way and leave a lot of damage in your wake, hurting people close to you and being hurt in turn? People can inflict immeasurable amounts of pain on one another (or mash each other up as I like to put it) without ever laying a hand on each other. In fact, I think I'd rather go through the bodily trauma of being shot or run over by a bus rather than the unquantifiable emotional anguish that threatens to overwhelm me when I feel unloved and unwanted. I can deal with physical pain. The mental prison of broken relationships is something else all together. There really isn't an effective analogy for it.

Sometimes I think I have to be more vulnerable to the pain of broken relationships than the rest of the world because it seems every time I turn around my heart is hurting. I'm so willing to open up my heart to people. I'm innately trusting. I'm unequivocally willing to give of my self--especially to my brothers and sisters in Christ. I spent some time this afternoon trying to think about why I'm this way. I like to think it's because I'm a genuine, loving kind person so filled with God's love that it flows out of me. That the real story here is that I just love people. To some extent this is definitely true, but it's also not the only part of the story.

My love isn't always (maybe isn't ever) a completely unselfish love. At the end of the day I want to be loved back. I want people to need me the same way I need them. I can actually be stretched pretty far in relationships before this selfishness kicks in. I do have a forgiving heart and when people don't come for me or when they let me down I'm quick to keep loving them. Yet, when it happens over and over again, and I finally realize someone I've come to rely on for loving me back doesn't, my heart aches in ways I didn't think it was possible to ache and still be alive. As much as I want to blame them, whether they be family, friends, ex's, I can't. It's really not their fault. It's mine. When my love gets disordered and I start needing and loving people more than the Lord the world starts to get topsy turvey very quickly and the wounds I have from it go deeper inside of me than most anything else.

This is why God tells us in Proverbs 4 "to guard our heart for it is the well-spring of life." Heart-guarding seems so contradictory to me in many ways. I don't want to hold myself back from people. And I really buck the model of people not deserving my love, especially when I consider it against the foundation of my faith: that Christ loved us all when we didn't deserve it. How does guarding my heart weigh in against turning the other cheek doctrine? Or how does guarding my heart stack against loving my neighbor as myself? I don't know the answer to either of those questions. It's probably the reason for all of my relationship battle scars. As much as it hurts, I refuse to live my life with my fist clenched tightly around my heart, not letting anyone in. I can't. It's not me. But there has to be some balance between that and the other extreme of giving my heart to everyone who walks into my life.

Ultimately, I think that balance is found in one of God's other directives in Deuteronomy 6:5, "Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, all of your soul, all of your strength." We need to love God first. We need to find our identity in Him and not seek that validation out in anything else. Some of you love your jobs first, some of you love your car, or some of you love your reputation first. For me, I love people first. My relationships in my life validate me. As noble and genuine as that sounds or as I make it up to be in my head, at the end of the day it's still a disordered version of crazy love. It's still me loving God's creation before I love God and it makes my life all kinds of messy.

loving on people, part I

All of us, at some point or another, stop to wonder why we're here, why we're living life, what's the point of being alive. Sometimes these thoughts are spurred by a pressing life crisis, other times by a spirited discussion with friends over dinner. Some of us are simply a bit more reflective about life by nature. I'm certainly one of those more reflective people, but recent life circumstances have led me to stewing about a version of this question a lot lately: what is the pinnacle of human experience? My faith affords me a fair amount of perspective on this question, and really most of the ideas I would put forward are not particularly revolutionary. Still, I wonder. I wonder why I have a deep soul longing to find that perfect intersection of happiness, joy, contentment. Pick an adjective. None of them exactly articulate the feeling I'm trying to describe. It's more a conglomeration of everything that I understand to be good. Some combination of feeling and knowledge.

Really the "what's the point" question boils down to figuring out how to experience crazy love while I'm here on earth, in absence of the eternal presence of God. After listening to several sermons by people far smarter than myself, I've come to a few conclusions about how to experience crazy love, but two over-arching ideas seem to make the most sense to me at the moment. One fairly obvious, the other less obvious.

First to the obvious way to experience crazy love (which while obvious is certainly by no means simple to achieve): love God. People have a lot of thoughts to offer about this, how to do it, what it looks like to do it. Fortunately, God has already given us clear instructions on how we are to love him:

"For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments" I John 5:3

To love God then, is to obey Him. But in order to obey Him you must know Him and his commandments. So the clear path to loving God is to get to know him through studying His living and breathing words to us in the Bible. Unfortunately for us and our instant gratification tendencies this isn't something that happens overnight. It happens over a lifetime, a lifetime of reading, studying, and knowing God's word. It's also not something that can happen by force. You have to choose to love God, but not because of what you might get or lose if you don't, rather because he deserves it and you recognize that in the deepest part of your soul. You want to love him because of who he is: good, loving, perfect, righteous (there are a lot of names and reasons to choose from). I'm at the beginning of this road in my own life, which after for being a Christian for over 20 years is somewhat discouraging. Thankfully is also incredibly exciting, in a way you can only really know if you open yourself up to studying the Bible and knowing God.

The other major way I think we can experience crazy love on earth is through healthy, loving relationships with believers. These can be friendships or dating relationships or marriages. And arguably the last of those three is the most fulfilling (but that's for another blog that I'm not fully qualified to write yet). God is by definition a community: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Before He created us he co-existed in a loving relationship between three beings. Love has always existed. Love is. It is beyond time, and this makes sense because as John says, "God is love."

This revelation really helped me to understand why I crave authentic Christian community so much. It's because when I'm loving on my brothers and sisters in Christ and being loved on by them I'm experiencing God. I'm experiencing existence the way God intended me to when he created me. I'd argue you can really only live a joyful, complete life by pursuing a community of loving relationships. In fact, I believe it so fully that I make loving on the people I care about the most important thing in my life. Here's the catch though, you can really only do this loving community thing if you really love God:

"Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God"
I John 4:7

Who or what are you loving in your life right now? If it's not God and the people you care about, it's probably pretty unsatisfying.