A while back, I walked through a fairly in-depth study of the book of Genesis. One of the most impactful lessons I learned from that study remains Genesis 2, when God creates man and woman. "It is not good for man to be alone," He proclaims, and then proceeds to form Eve from a rib taken from Adam's side. There are so many things we can learn about God and about men and women from these few verses.
What stands out to me though, and what my life circumstances seem to have been confirming over the past several months, is that God fashioned men and women with different parts of Himself. In many ways we are incredibly similar, but women have been gifted with the servant's spirit of our Savior. And more and more it seems to me that God gave women the ability to love differently than men.
Women's hearts are fascinating. Mysterious. Even to us as women. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out why this is lately, and the best thing I can come up with is that as a born again Christian woman, my heart is different from my brothers' in Christ hearts. To fully understand my own heart would be to fully understand God in a way that I can't. This is exciting and frightening. Exciting because I can love without abandon in a way akin to my Savior. Exciting because the more I get to know my Lord the more I come to understand myself. Still, frightening because I also have to be wise and judicious with my love. Two qualities that seem to go directly against unabandoned love, or a least lay down a few good sized hurdles.
So how do I reign in a heart I cannot fully know? How do I guard my heart as the well spring of life as my Lord calls me to in Proverbs 4? Two ways: get in the Word to write it on my heart, and moment-by-moment surrender to allow God to rule my heart instead of trying to rule it myself.
"Watch over your heart with all diligence for from it flow the springs of life." Proverbs 4:23
Showing posts with label Love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Love. Show all posts
Monday, November 23, 2009
Friday, October 2, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
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
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.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
defining love, part two
In the first part of this post on love, I went straight to 1 John 4 to say that God is love, and pointed out that, because God is the very definition of love, it's impossible to fully understand love. I believe that. However, in the Bible God offers three very clear explanations of God as love and, by extension, a model of love, even if we can't fully understand it or express it.
The first and most well-known example of God as love and as a model of love is John 3:16:
"For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life."
This verse probably deserves a post of its own. I don't have children yet, but I can't imagine giving up my only child, my child who I love more than I can explain in words, to save people other people I love, let alone people who don't know me or love me back. But that's exactly what God did for all of us. He sacrificed that we might not die.
The second part of God as love and as a model of how we are to love is service. One of the most poignant examples of service found in the Bible is when Jesus washes his disciples' feet...
"Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with towel that was wrapped around him...'Do you understand what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to was one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you." John 13:3-5, 12-15
It's hard to explain or understand the significance of this event given the fact that the majority of people I come into contact with every day wear shoes. Think about spending a week walking around in a cornfield bearfoot and then going to the White House for dinner and having the President of the United States wash your feet for you as you sit at his table, and you can beging to have some idea of what was going on here. What is more important than the act of service, however, is the attitude of service. Jesus is humble. He is serving not out of any motivation for self-promotion. He is serving as a demonstration of his love.
The third part of God as love and as our model of love is obedience. As with service, this isn't obedience out of compulsion. It's obedience out of genuine and complete devotion to another. There are several parables on obedience in the New Testament and several examples of obedience and the consequences of disobedience in the Old Testament, but the simplest and most powerful example of obedience in the Bible is Christ:
"Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, how, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." Philippians 2:5-8
Christ, God in human form, was obedient to the Father. Not obedient to the point of giving away an old piece of clothing or buying your friend lunch or cleaning up the kitchen after the dinner because your mom asked you to. Obedient to the point of death. Obedient in humility. Obedient not to be exalted, but because he loved all of us enough to sacrifice himself for us.
Taken together, these three examples of love leave us with a sort of incomprehensible, non-sensical picture of an idea that gets thrown around so carelessly and easily in everyday life. Love isn't that electricity that runs up and down the back of your neck when you meet someone you think you want to know forever. Love isn't some sort of fuzzy, make your head spin, make your heart race kind of emotion. Rather love is an active and ongoing choice. Love is sacrificing yourself and your desires no matter how much it hurts you because you know it helps the one you love. Love is serving in humility. Love is obedience as the perfect expression of your devotion. Love is totally and completely unselfish. How does this connect back to crazy love? It's crazy to try to think about how much God loves us. It's crazy to think that God is this perfect expression of obedience, sacrifice, and service, because this combination of sacrifice, service, and obedience runs against the grain of most definitions of love.
Ultimately, we can't experience or express this kind of love apart from Christ. Because this love isn't within human capacity, it's out of God's enabling. Merely thinking through my day today, who and what I was obedient to, what I sacrificed for, who I served, I have a long way to go in knowing and understanding this kind of love. But I still want to. I want to give and receive this choosing, self-sacrificing, perfect, holy kind of love in every kind of relationship I have. Because, to go back to something I said in part one of this blog, without this kind of love, this divine love, I am nothing.
The first and most well-known example of God as love and as a model of love is John 3:16:
"For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life."
This verse probably deserves a post of its own. I don't have children yet, but I can't imagine giving up my only child, my child who I love more than I can explain in words, to save people other people I love, let alone people who don't know me or love me back. But that's exactly what God did for all of us. He sacrificed that we might not die.
The second part of God as love and as a model of how we are to love is service. One of the most poignant examples of service found in the Bible is when Jesus washes his disciples' feet...
"Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with towel that was wrapped around him...'Do you understand what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to was one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you." John 13:3-5, 12-15
It's hard to explain or understand the significance of this event given the fact that the majority of people I come into contact with every day wear shoes. Think about spending a week walking around in a cornfield bearfoot and then going to the White House for dinner and having the President of the United States wash your feet for you as you sit at his table, and you can beging to have some idea of what was going on here. What is more important than the act of service, however, is the attitude of service. Jesus is humble. He is serving not out of any motivation for self-promotion. He is serving as a demonstration of his love.
The third part of God as love and as our model of love is obedience. As with service, this isn't obedience out of compulsion. It's obedience out of genuine and complete devotion to another. There are several parables on obedience in the New Testament and several examples of obedience and the consequences of disobedience in the Old Testament, but the simplest and most powerful example of obedience in the Bible is Christ:
"Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, how, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." Philippians 2:5-8
Christ, God in human form, was obedient to the Father. Not obedient to the point of giving away an old piece of clothing or buying your friend lunch or cleaning up the kitchen after the dinner because your mom asked you to. Obedient to the point of death. Obedient in humility. Obedient not to be exalted, but because he loved all of us enough to sacrifice himself for us.
Taken together, these three examples of love leave us with a sort of incomprehensible, non-sensical picture of an idea that gets thrown around so carelessly and easily in everyday life. Love isn't that electricity that runs up and down the back of your neck when you meet someone you think you want to know forever. Love isn't some sort of fuzzy, make your head spin, make your heart race kind of emotion. Rather love is an active and ongoing choice. Love is sacrificing yourself and your desires no matter how much it hurts you because you know it helps the one you love. Love is serving in humility. Love is obedience as the perfect expression of your devotion. Love is totally and completely unselfish. How does this connect back to crazy love? It's crazy to try to think about how much God loves us. It's crazy to think that God is this perfect expression of obedience, sacrifice, and service, because this combination of sacrifice, service, and obedience runs against the grain of most definitions of love.
Ultimately, we can't experience or express this kind of love apart from Christ. Because this love isn't within human capacity, it's out of God's enabling. Merely thinking through my day today, who and what I was obedient to, what I sacrificed for, who I served, I have a long way to go in knowing and understanding this kind of love. But I still want to. I want to give and receive this choosing, self-sacrificing, perfect, holy kind of love in every kind of relationship I have. Because, to go back to something I said in part one of this blog, without this kind of love, this divine love, I am nothing.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
defining love, part one
What is love? If you had to define it right this second, what are the first things that come to your mind? I asked a few of my friends to define love in 50 words or less, with the caveat that they had to write down whatever immediately came to mind. Here are some of the responses I got:
"All the best emotions. Rolled into one."
"Love is being willing to sacrifice one's will for another. Love is always wanting the best for the other person. Love is letting go even when it hurts. Love is setting an example to others. Love is a beautiful feeling that surpasses common sense thinking."
"Love is consuming. Love is wonderful. Love is painful. Love can't be explained rationally."
"Love, it's a safe, non-judgmental commitment in which you give selflessly and unconditionally, and are challenged to grow into the best person you can be."
Love. Four letters. Enough meaning to keep you thinking for a lifetime. The variety in these responses didn't really surprise me. But a common thread weaves through all of them. Love is good. Love is something you want. Love not only can be painful, it often is. Novelists, and poets, and musicians, and philosophers have spent centuries writing, and singing, and talking about love. And yet, it's a question people keep coming back to: what is love? In some form or other, all of our souls seem to long for love and most of us spend our lives hoping for love or disappointed by love or both. Is love what makes us human then? Can we live without love? Can we live with love, even when it hurts so much?
One of the most often quoted passages from the Bible is on love. In Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, you'll find a chapter that is read at the vast majority of Christian weddings, and even many non-Christian weddings, with verses that have wound their way into our common understanding of what love is:
"Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things." 1 Corinthians 13:4-7
Reading that passage, it's easy to understand why it's hard to define love. Believing all things and hoping all things and enduring all things aren't things that come easily to many people. The inherent self-sacrificing nature of love is perhaps the most difficult and the most poignant part of love, but also the part no one seems to question. Love and self-sacrifice are intertwined in a way that only makes sense when you're in the midst of love.
I like to think love comes easily to me. I'm constantly telling people that I really don't care about anything but loving on people. The only real evidence I have that this is truly how I live my life is that my heart constantly seems to be getting broken in one way or another--whether by friends or family or enemies or people I don't even know all that well. And yet, without fail, despite the ongoing heartache, I endure, I believe, I hope. I can't explain why, except to point to an earlier part of Paul's chapter on love:
"And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing." 1 Corinthians 13:2
You can have everything in the world, you can know everything in the world, you can do everything in the world, you can even have the power to lift a mountain up out of the ground and move it wherever you want at will, but without love you are nothing. Without love I am nothing. Nothing. The lack or absence of anything at all. I think this is how, in my own mind, I justify living life with my heart held out in my hand for anyone and everyone I meet to grab a hold of, even if just for a moment. By any rationale standard, this isn't the safest way to go. It involves an incredible amount of risk and repeated instances of heartbreak. But, after 25 years of holding my heart out to the world, I've realized I'd rather spend my life enduring and believing and hoping than spend my life as nothing. I'd rather spend my life living through constant heartache--even if sometimes I feel like I might die from the weight of it all--than spend my life having everything else but never having what I need.
So what is love? I don't think love is something I fully understand. Not yet. Maybe I never will. In fact, I'm convinced I never will because of 1 John 4:8, which simply states, "God is love." To fully understand love is to fully understand God, and I'm convinced that's something I will never be able to do. What I do know is that I want the kind of love Paul talks about in his letter to the Corinthians. I want this kind of love because, "If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us," (1 John 4:12).
This, then, is how I choose to live my life: loving as much as I can, loving as hard as I can, loving as easily as I can, loving as often as I can, and loving as quickly as I can, no matter how terrifying it is, and not matter how much heartbreak it means. Because in the end, the more I know about love and feel love and give love, the more I know God and that makes all the heartbreak, both imaginable and unimaginable worth it...
I'll connect this back to crazy love in "defining love, part two".
"All the best emotions. Rolled into one."
"Love is being willing to sacrifice one's will for another. Love is always wanting the best for the other person. Love is letting go even when it hurts. Love is setting an example to others. Love is a beautiful feeling that surpasses common sense thinking."
"Love is consuming. Love is wonderful. Love is painful. Love can't be explained rationally."
"Love, it's a safe, non-judgmental commitment in which you give selflessly and unconditionally, and are challenged to grow into the best person you can be."
Love. Four letters. Enough meaning to keep you thinking for a lifetime. The variety in these responses didn't really surprise me. But a common thread weaves through all of them. Love is good. Love is something you want. Love not only can be painful, it often is. Novelists, and poets, and musicians, and philosophers have spent centuries writing, and singing, and talking about love. And yet, it's a question people keep coming back to: what is love? In some form or other, all of our souls seem to long for love and most of us spend our lives hoping for love or disappointed by love or both. Is love what makes us human then? Can we live without love? Can we live with love, even when it hurts so much?
One of the most often quoted passages from the Bible is on love. In Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, you'll find a chapter that is read at the vast majority of Christian weddings, and even many non-Christian weddings, with verses that have wound their way into our common understanding of what love is:
"Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things." 1 Corinthians 13:4-7
Reading that passage, it's easy to understand why it's hard to define love. Believing all things and hoping all things and enduring all things aren't things that come easily to many people. The inherent self-sacrificing nature of love is perhaps the most difficult and the most poignant part of love, but also the part no one seems to question. Love and self-sacrifice are intertwined in a way that only makes sense when you're in the midst of love.
I like to think love comes easily to me. I'm constantly telling people that I really don't care about anything but loving on people. The only real evidence I have that this is truly how I live my life is that my heart constantly seems to be getting broken in one way or another--whether by friends or family or enemies or people I don't even know all that well. And yet, without fail, despite the ongoing heartache, I endure, I believe, I hope. I can't explain why, except to point to an earlier part of Paul's chapter on love:
"And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing." 1 Corinthians 13:2
You can have everything in the world, you can know everything in the world, you can do everything in the world, you can even have the power to lift a mountain up out of the ground and move it wherever you want at will, but without love you are nothing. Without love I am nothing. Nothing. The lack or absence of anything at all. I think this is how, in my own mind, I justify living life with my heart held out in my hand for anyone and everyone I meet to grab a hold of, even if just for a moment. By any rationale standard, this isn't the safest way to go. It involves an incredible amount of risk and repeated instances of heartbreak. But, after 25 years of holding my heart out to the world, I've realized I'd rather spend my life enduring and believing and hoping than spend my life as nothing. I'd rather spend my life living through constant heartache--even if sometimes I feel like I might die from the weight of it all--than spend my life having everything else but never having what I need.
So what is love? I don't think love is something I fully understand. Not yet. Maybe I never will. In fact, I'm convinced I never will because of 1 John 4:8, which simply states, "God is love." To fully understand love is to fully understand God, and I'm convinced that's something I will never be able to do. What I do know is that I want the kind of love Paul talks about in his letter to the Corinthians. I want this kind of love because, "If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us," (1 John 4:12).
This, then, is how I choose to live my life: loving as much as I can, loving as hard as I can, loving as easily as I can, loving as often as I can, and loving as quickly as I can, no matter how terrifying it is, and not matter how much heartbreak it means. Because in the end, the more I know about love and feel love and give love, the more I know God and that makes all the heartbreak, both imaginable and unimaginable worth it...
I'll connect this back to crazy love in "defining love, part two".
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