At launch back in January, our squad coach Betsy – otherwise
known as the birthplace of wisdom, grace, spiritual sucker punches and love
abundant – said a quote that I wrote in my journal and that has been popping up
quite often in my life lately.
“Love is not always emotionally satisfying.”
How beautiful and true,
I had mused as I semi-artistically doodled the words into the margin of the
journal page, unaware of the bomb of real life that was about to hit me in the
next few months.
Beautiful and true Betsy’s words are indeed, but when God
begins to ask that you walk them out, beautiful and true they no longer seem.
Truth be told, I think we as a Christian culture have done a
great disservice to defining love. If you wade through pop-Christian-culture muck
of romanticized ideas of Jesus as a peace-sign-throwing hippie and the fluffy
quotations of 1 Corinthians 13 and the shallow Pinterest memes of
quasi-inspirational love quotes that make their way around the Internets for
young girls to post on their Facebook pages with this sign of a heart <3,
you will discover that despite all that we have made it out to be,
living a lifestyle of love
absolutely, horrifically, tremendously sucks.
It goes against everything innate in us. It is possibly the
greatest contradiction we’ve been asked to live in when all we’re wired to do
is bring an end to dissonance through harmony.
Love gives when it wants to get.
Love still chooses when it’s rejected.
Love stills plays with the orphaned child that just called
it fat. (No, of course that isn’t a real life example from this week at the
orphanage where we worked.)
Love seeks out when it’s abandoned.
Love forgives when it’s betrayed.
Love opens its arms to clenched fists.
Love does what is simply not normal to do.
And as humans, we do not naturally do that. The human way is
to live by emotions or by rational thought, by what makes sense to us in a
moment. Not least is my post-modern generation, where the appropriate way to
behave is now however you feel like behaving in any particular instance, to
live driven by what makes you feel the best in the moment with no real need for
accountability to anything you’ve done because it was how you truly felt then
even if your convictions have shifted since.
Relationships of all kinds in my life have been a solid eight
on a scale of 1 to wildly unsuccessful, and I owe that to my gross
misperception of what love actually is.
I’ve lived operating as though love looks and feels like
constant acceptance. As though it always feels awesome and whatever makes me
feel awesome counts as valid love. As though appreciation and affirmation and
care taking and protection and provision and safety and smiling and twinkling
eyes and a chorus of “good job’s” and “well done’s” are what love always looks
like.
Sometimes, it is. Sometimes love does all of those things
and it makes us feel like we’re six inches taller, like everything is great
with the world, like we’ve got something to offer that people want and need and
that we’re really going to be alright.
But because love does what it is abnormal to do, there are
the other times – the ones Betsy was referring to – the times when love looks
radically counterintuitive to what we’ve imagined and ceases to be emotionally
satisfying.
Because sometimes love chooses to call us up out of our sin
instead of accepting us in it.
Sometimes what makes us feel awesome is not actually love at
all and may be quite the opposite.
Sometimes love doesn’t provide what we need because we don’t
really need it.
Sometimes love doesn’t keep us safe or protect us because it
sees that walking through what is unsafe and dangerous might make us and others
better, stronger, tougher, wiser.
Sometimes love lets us die because it sees that the death of
one thing is the key to life in another.
Jesus didn’t feel emotionally satisfying love on the cross.
He even asked Love why it was forsaking him, letting him remain in the most
painful moment in human history without saving him or protecting him.
But sometimes love doesn’t protect us from what is painful.
It doesn’t always feel good. It doesn’t do what we want it
to. It doesn’t feel like we expect it to. Sometimes love looks a lot more like
compassionate passivity than fighting gloves.
It just seems to suck.
But luckily, what love is is not defined by emotions or how
we feel.
Love is always seeking our superlative, how things can be
best for us, and it recognizes that us getting the best in the future might
mean us getting the worst in the present.
And because of that, love always brings us to a place where
we have become something we never could have through the struggles it didn’t stop,
the pain it didn’t alleviate, the protection it didn’t seem to provide, the
care it didn’t seem to give, the affirmation it didn’t seem to lavish, and the
death it didn’t spare.
Love sees past emotion, because at the end of the day it
know that it, love, is the only thing that we were created for, and love knows
it.
And real love changes everything for good; despite the
hardships we expect it to spare us.
Love releases.
Love heals.
Love covers.
Love wins.
Which is why love only
ever presently sucks.
m
[bolivia]
