Something Has to be Said for Love
I’ve gotten into a habit over the last few years of staying up late at night. There are a few things that I enjoy immensely about my late night experiences and not the least of these is the infomercials. I find it fun to watch products that will most likely brake with any extensive use, but you know that for the few easy payments, the magic food chopper will somehow change your life.
It’s interesting to think of God in the same context(payment plans and changed lives.)
One night I was on a late night kick and started watching the movie Spanglish about midway through. It’s always convenient that at that hour, you can guarantee that another showing of the movie you’re watching will come on directly afterwards. So knowing that I’d be able to watch the first of it directly after it was over without having to actually go to the movie rental store and rent it to watch the rest, I plunged myself in.
And I balled my eyes out.
There is a scene where the main characters divulge some pretty deep and sensitive secrets including an affair and just nasty, family breaking stuff. And God, like He always does seemed to nudge Himself into my personal space without really asking what I wanted. You know, typical God stuff.
I’m grateful though. Because what He spoke, I needed to hear. We’ll come back to that in just a moment.
You need to understand something about me. I don’t have a radical testimony about overcoming alcohol and smoking pot and doing a rock of cocaine every night. I’m not a sex maniac who has to worry about STD’s and getting a girl pregnant from sexual relationships. I’ve never stolen anything except a piece of candy from a gas station once when I was 9. I’ve never murdered and barely thought about it. I’ve lived a pretty sheltered life. That’s not to say I’m perfect and without sin. I’m nowhere near ready to cast any stones. Rest assured I do have issues and we’ll get into that later.
Part two of what you need to understand is that I’m an idealist to no end.
If I do something, I want to finish it. If I attend college I won’t be happy with just an Associates Degree, I need the Bachelors. I can’t rest with just beating a video game unless I’ve beaten it 100%. I have to read every word in, on the outside of and most of the time on the internet about a book before I’m able to put it down. It’s just how I work.
So where these two thoughts come together is, as a naïve new disciple of Christ yeas ago when explaining my ideal mate to God, I told Him that she needed to be beautiful and that she needed to be a virgin. I wanted her to be perfect like me (I say this completely sarcastic but still naïve). I kept thinking that in my quest to save myself for my wife that obviously she would have the same thoughts about me and that once we met the stars would align and the birds would sing and the road before us would turn into a vast beach for us to walk and talk for hours. I’ve come to grips since then that nothing really happens that way and not everything I desire will be given to me.
To save you the boring details of my whole uneventful dating life in the last few years, I want to tell you the story of one of my friends. My friend grew up in the ghetto. If you asked him what the Ten Commandments were he would laugh in your face. He did recognize Moses (because Moses is the name of his Rottweiler). This kid had a drug problem from an early age. He would drink like a fish and as a byproduct stayed planted in bed with girls a lot. Now he has grown up and found Christ and through a long chain of events found a girl that he was kind intrigued by. But she has saved herself for her husband and he hasn’t saved himself for anyone.
When she found out, she was devastated.
She’s an idealist like me. All or nothing.
He was left kind of just cleaning up the mess he made in his past. Through a lot of prayer and understanding and the love of God, she was able to see eye to eye with him and realize that it wasn’t something he did to hurt her, but it was a mistake that he made at an early age. They’re happy together to this day.
Why do I tell this story? Because I believe the God we serve is into this sort of thing, and let me tell you how.
There was a group of people once upon a time who was rescued. Let me even back up further so that you understand what exactly happened to them. This people received a promise from their lover, their friend, their father, that no matter what happened He would always look after them. He would always love them and He would always have their best interest in mind. This father, friend, lover, was incapable of anything but love towards these people because they were the apple of His eye.
These people made choices and similar to my friend, found themselves disoriented and “in bed” so to speak in places they knew they shouldn’t have gone to begin with. So they cried out for their lover to come back. Years went by in which He allowed, through agony His bride, His love to undergo slavery and pain, a natural byproduct of the choices they had made. This lover, friend, father, was able to rescue them, but allowed them the opportunity to let their choices speak for themselves. Something to the effect of two words that haunt me to this day: natural consequences.
My mom and dad are the poster parents for raising a Godly family. You hear the scripture all the time, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” I’m here to tell you that my parents have laid their hands on me in discipline maybe 5 times in my life. I have my problems, obviously but my mom had this system figured out that would drive me nuts. At times I begged her to just hit me. She would call it natural consequences. The actions that I committed were always followed by equal consequences. I seem to remember some scientific theorem about that, but we won’t go into all of that right now. It works! If I did something stupid to get in trouble, my mom didn’t have to hit me, she allowed the natural consequence of my action to set in. If I did something to lose her trust, she wouldn’t trust me. It brings completely new meaning to, “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” I watched her toil through my mistakes. It made me see at an early age that my actions truly impact other people.
So this lover and my mother must have been in cahoots, because all through the story, you see Him allow the people that He loved suffer natural consequences. The pain must have been excrutiating for Him to look at the people that He was meant to be with walking away and even see them whipped and in chains. So the time arose for His dramatic rescue and it was dramatic! You can read about it in Exodus.
The thing that I really want to get at is much like the movie Spanglish and much like my friend, we as humans have the capacity to really botch stuff sometimes.
I think I remember reading something similar to this one time:
“So you really think you can love someone? You really think you’re capable of showing someone the love that has been bestowed on you by your Father? Try laying down your life for your neighbor. Try dying for the people who spit in your face. That’s true love.”
Okay so I might have exaggerated it a little bit, but I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is exactly what the scripture is trying to say.
I don’t believe for one second that the children of
I like to think that if we love God the way we’re supposed to that we will automatically fear God the way we’re supposed to. Maybe it’s naïve, but I think the love that God asks, also commands fear. What do I mean?
It comes back to Spanglish. I promised we’d come back.
In the movie, the wife was incapable of showing her husband the love that he deserved. But the husband, man can we learn a lot from him. After her admission to an affair and totally expecting to be forgotten and lost, the husband’s response is so redeeming and so indicative of a love that few people in the world will ever grasp(albeit, it’s arrived upon after long and heavy deliberation, but what else can you expect from a human, barely capable of loving.) He chooses to love her. I could use a lot of other words here, but here’s what I mean. The fear that is exemplified in this love is given with his choice to love. He has no idea whether or not she actually will break off this love affair. He has no idea whether she actually wants to be with him or is saving face for their children. He has no idea if the marriage is even savable, but he puts aside all of the fear driven human reactions to love her. To show her that no matter what she’s done that he is capable of loving her because she asked his forgiveness.
God does the same thing everyday. He extends His hand to us in spite of our continual ability to cast Him off to the side and have our affairs with things. It’s not that we don’t love Him, it’s that we don’t know how to love Him through our fears. It’s that we don’t know how to cast aside or indifferences with the human race. Think of it like this, besides God, what has every human relationship we’ve ever been in done to us? It has hurt us. It has abused us. It has taken instead of given. It has dragged us through the mud and expected more out of us than we can give.
It’s so easy to withdraw.
If humans are our example for relationships, how can we trust someone who doesn’t always feel there for us? How can we trust the “air” to hold us and to love us when we continually hurt Him?
Conversely, God is asking us to tip the scale. He’s asking us to flip the whole thing around and look at it from a new point of view. Instead of taking human relationships as the golden standard, He wants us to look at Him for how to love people. Unexpecting. Unconditional. Unrequited.
Love through fear. Love with an understanding of what it is to fear, but trust instead.
Jesus was all about that.
I think of a disciple who failed on an every day basis and Jesus was able to life Him up on an every day basis. Not in a false and pretentious human love, but in a love that said, “I care about you more than you realize, no matter how much I have to beat you over the head.”
He was there to hold out His hand when His brother, His friend was unable to walk on water and began to sink. He said I love you for trusting me.
He was definitely there even after His brother, His friend abandoned Him and said that he had never even associated with the man. He proved His continual willingness to love through the continual passion and pursuit of the heart of Peter.
Jesus was at the well when the Samaritan woman who had known love as sex truly needed Him. He was able to show the gentle path to salvation for a woman who was so used to being used for everything she could offer and nothing that anyone ever saw her for.
He was even showing love in the temple when he turned over the tables. This time to His Father who deserved better than thieves living in His home.
He exemplified His love a few times in His words and their worth reading again and applying again, “Greater love has no man than he who would lay down his life for his friends.” and, “Love your enemy, do good to those who mistreat you.”
