I've been thinking a lot about love lately; ever since my pastor talked about love at Heartland a few Sundays ago and we've been unpacking this a little bit at work too in our weekly "Babel Study."
The Bible says we are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love others as we love ourselves. After reading that verse hundreds or thousands of times, the last time I read it it meant something different to me. We are to love God differently than we love others. We cannot love God the same way that we love each other. We are to love God all the time, doing everything for his glory, meditating on him day and night. We cannot and SHOULD NOT love others in this same way. Doing so would make them a god and god-ship is, obviously, reserved for only one and He is a very jealous God. We don't love people ALL the time; we aren't actively loving others every single second of the day, meditating on them, thinking about them, doing everything for them. We ARE called to actively love God all the time though. Furthermore, when I don't love God all the time (i.e.: when I sin), it means there's a place (or most likely more than one place) in my heart that I've reserved for myself, or self-love. To love him with all our soul means giving up our rights to be right, letting God defend us and if he doesn't, we're defenseless. In diving, where your head goes, your body follows and it's the same with spirituality and matters of the heart. The head directs the body and heart. So loving God with all our mind means meditating on him and things that come from him (Philippians 4:8-9). If we do that, our bodies and our hearts WILL follow. It's been proven that emotion follows thought. The more we think about God, the more we love him with our hearts, and the more we exhibit that love with our bodies (through acts of service, saving ourselves for marriage, how we treat others, etc … ). It's like the more I think about someone romantically, the more my heart responds and the more my body follows suit (i.e.: going out of my way to do nice things for him, wanting to be in close proximity to him, finding ways to touch him, etc … ).
When we love others with the same intensity and propensity that should be reserved for God, that's when we begin to try and extract more from them than they were originally designed by God to give. And that's when they become false gods to us. The same holds true for ourselves: we often times try to extract more from ourselves than what we were originally designed to give to someone (having high expectations for ourselves or being disappointed in ourselves when we fail to meet the unreasonably high expectations set by us or others around us) and in turn we make false gods of ourselves. If we were putting God on the throne at all times, we would not have the need to give more than what we were designed to give because all our needs would be met and satisfied by God, in ways far deeper, far outside the boundaries than other humans can satisfy them. That intensity and propensity of love was designed by God for us; he loved and loves us with that intensity so that we would turn it back to him. Our error is in turning that love inward to ourselves or outward to others, instead of upward. Loving God requires a love that is separate and altogether different than loving others.
We spend so much time asking ourselves, whether consciously or not, How can I be loved more? And how we answer ourselves plays itself out from that point on in how we interact with others and most importantly how we interact with ourselves and how our spirits interact with the Holy Spirit. We manipulate. We push. We pull. We beg. We avoid. We put on our masks to cover up the real us-es, the parts of us that we have previously exposed only to have those parts pointed at cruelly and then discarded and rejected. Our point of reference is so self-centered that all our lives it's been our mission in life to get people to love us, after all why wouldn't they? We think to ourselves, If only I could make them see me, the real me, then I know they would love me. If they could just get beyond my slightly overweight appearance, my big nose, mousy hair, problem skin, and get down to who I am underneath they'd see how beautiful I am. And we set out to do just that, to make ourselves known, forcing others to take a closer look at who we are. Which more often than not sends them running in the opposite direction because we haven't looked at who they really are so they seek it out from someone else. And the cycle perpetuates. All of this complexity is easily solvable. It can be reduced down to changing our question from How can I be loved more? to How do I love others more? If we would choose to take the focus of our own need for a minute and direct it instead to loving others and meeting their needs, they'd be more likely to see what we so desperately want them to see: that we are beautiful and lovable, even in the midst of all our brokeness.
On another note, Marilynne Robinson, the author of Gilead and others said, "Love is holy because it is like grace - the worthiness of its object is never really what matters." It doesn't matter how worthy we are of that love that God has for us. It just doesn't matter. He loves us and there's nothing we can do about it. We can't talk him out of it. There's nothing we can do or not do to make him love us any more or any less than he does right now in this very instant. God's love simply is and we'd be so much better off to just accept it, rather than fight it like we do. I long for a day when I finally learn to treat God's love as the salve that it is, letting it heal and restore even the most painful and ugliest of wounds. And the same can be said for human love. It doesn't matter how worthy someone is of our love, or how worthy we are of someone else's love. What matters is simply the love itself, that it exists, that we love and are loved. Instead we fight it, railing against it as though it were a weapon and not an offer of well-being, peace, and intimacy because we certainly don't deserve those things. We turn into something far more complex than God intended for it to be. It's simple: it's not, "Work for God's love, and force others to love you;" it's "Love God and love others."
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