Love v2

This is largely the same writing on love as before, but beefed up quite a bit to be used for a magazine at school. Enjoy :)


What exactly is love? Alexander Haddaway wants to know. Cole Porter wants to know. Christofer Ingle of NeverShoutNever wants to know. I’m guessing most of you want to know, or you wouldn’t be reading this. According to the apostle Paul, “love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” - 1 Corinthians 13:4-7.

These days we throw the word “love” around like nobody’s business. We love pizza, we love movies, and we love candy, but we don’t love each other. In personal relationships, the only place it really matters, our “love” is tainted. We use affection like currency in order to get what we want (most often the approval of others). This is unbelievably selfish. Relationships feel less like love as described above and more like speculation on the stock market. How messed up is it that we feel as insecure and uncertain about showing affection as a greedy businessman feels about spending his money? The question that plagues our subconscious is “what will be the return on my investment?” Just like a shareholder on Wall Street, we lend our love to borrowers, but only if we expect it to be repaid in full. We only show love if we feel like we are receiving love, and if one of our “investments” misses a payment, we lash out at them. As soon as one member of a relationship slips up (an averted gaze, an unkind word, a moment of pride), a deadly cycle begins. The other person’s faith is shattered; they feel they have done something wrong and the resulting insecurity stops them from showing affection. But don’t we all make mistakes? Is there anything more human than having flaws? Yet even knowing this, as any good stockbroker would advise, when we feel that what we have to gain in a relationship is threatened, we completely pull out our own investment of “love.” But by doing this we make the other person feel the same rejection, perpetuating the insecurity and effectively breaking the relationship. Plus, wouldn’t it follow that those who are unable to give out love are the ones who need it the most? The unloving are unloved and seek nothing but love, yet they are discarded and left in the cold darkness of loneliness because they are unable to love us and therefore cannot improve our stock portfolios of relational conquest. This whole attitude is nothing but “self-seeking” and “proud,” this is keeping a record of wrongs, and this is not even close to love. And yet we bask in the glory of playing this game! We throw aside our dignity and allow our self-worth to be determined by the amount of affection we can earn. We’re all hopeless beggars, desperate for the next meal of affection, and we gobble up scraps of conditional pseudo-love from lenders with their own selfish ambitions, ignoring the cost all the while. We let ourselves become slaves to their affection until we feel like we can’t survive without it. We become puppets, obliged to bend ourselves in any direction that our masters pull the strings in order to scrape together another meal to feed the hungry beast in our soul. We’re constantly measuring ourselves, deciding whether each of our actions makes us better or worse, more or less likely to be affirmed, and as a result we move ourselves up or down an invisible hierarchy in our minds.

This hierarchy is fruitless. In his book Searching for God Knows What, Donald Milller explains what he calls “lifeboat theory.” It poses the dilemma of several survivors of a shipwreck who are stuck in a lifeboat that is about to sink. If throwing one person overboard would save the rest, how do you decide who will drown? It’s easy enough to imagine how quickly heated comparisons and a self-promotion fiasco would arise: “I’m an athlete so I should live!” “But I’m the smartest one here!” “And besides, that guy only has one leg…” The sad truth is that we all live this out every day with our imaginations. We weigh ourselves against everyone, making sure to secure our spot at the top of the make-believe scale of importance so that we won’t be thrown overboard. We judge ourselves in this way constantly because society says that if you are not significant or good enough, we will drown: we will not go to college, we will not have friends, we will not get married, and we will not be happy. But, quite frankly, the water is fine. We just need to learn how to swim.

Real love is unconditional. It doesn’t go away when we screw up and it doesn’t increase when we do well. We didn’t earn it, we don’t deserve it, and yet nothing we do could ever take it away. Love tells us that who we are is not just okay, but in fact quite wonderful. In the song Love Is Not A Fight, Warren Barfield says that “love is a shelter in a raging storm. Love is peace in the middle of a war…Love is not a fight but it's something worth fighting for.” Love in its purest form just is, forever and ever, and it frees us in the same way to just be ourselves, “warts and all.” Love is the most beautiful thing in the world.

“Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” - 1 John 4:8. God offers a feast to the worst of beggars. His table is full and the door is always open; He loves us more than we could ever know simply because we are His, not because of anything we have done to try to earn it but quite unbelievably in spite of all the evils we have committed, even while we ignore Him and curse Him and hate Him and refuse to see ourselves for what we really are.

In John 4, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman who is getting water at a well. She tells him that she has no husband, and he replies, ‘You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true,’” (John 4: 16-18). This woman was doing exactly what all of us fall into every day: stuffing the void in her heart with whatever she can get, which happens to be the false love and affection of selfish men. Jesus says, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life" (John 4:13-14).

To know that we are loved so completely is to break the dependency on these affectionate lies, and this itself is true liberty. It is the freedom to ignore what we think we should be and see only what we are. It is forgetting whether or not we should say what’s on our minds and just saying it. It is forgetting where our hands should be and just placing them comfortably. It is forgetting what we look like, what we sound like, what we smell like, and how anything we do might hurt our self-esteem. It is the ability to laugh at our mistakes and enjoy being alive, and it is allowing all those around us to do the same. And, what’s more, while it is impossible to truly love others until we are secure in the fact that we are loved, if we eat from God’s table, chances are He’ll let us borrow some magnificent recipes.