I dedicate this blog to the person that taught me more about love in this past year than I have before— this one is for you.
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These past few months on the race I have been learning a lot about love. Before coming on the race I thought I had a pretty good idea about what love is and what it looks like, but it turns out that my perception of love was pretty skewed.
Let’s backtrack a bit to month five in Zambia— our squad mentor, Grace, gave a beautiful talk to us all about love and what it looks like. I remember her telling us “that if you don’t get love, you just don’t get it.” And for the rest of debrief, she encouraged us to go and talk to God about love and where we personally stand in our love story with him. And that’s when I realized that I am in the part of my life story where the girl starts to realize what being loved looks like and feels like.
But that was five months ago, and now I’m in month ten in Serbia.
Five countries and two continents later, my love story continues. But this time, my familiarity and knowledge of love has changed (and it’s changed the way I receive God’s love but also how I KNOW that I am loved.)
The point is: right now you are loved. And that is a FACT. Nothing in ALL of creation, in time and space, can ever change that. Why, you ask? Because of Jesus.
Since the beginning of time, God made a choice: a choice to love us, and he didn’t have to.
Jesus didn’t have to die on the cross for me or you or anyone. Jesus didn’t have to be born as a man and walk upon this earth only to have his life taken from him as an innocent man to be condemned to death of a crime he never committed, but he died. He died anyway because he wanted to the veil to be torn. He wanted us to be able to enter the place where God and we can commune together.
No more law. No more sacrifices. No more High Priests or intercessors. Jesus was the sacrifice and he entered the Temple where only the High Priest could enter to meet God and the veil tore. The VEIL TORE.
The veil tearing symbolizes that our relationship with God is already done— that is why grace and faith is a gift from God because we didn’t and don’t have to do anything to prove it.
He just loves us despite our integrity to allow ourselves to feel loved.
YOU. ARE. LOVED.
But then it boils down to a simple question: do we want to love God back and let Him love us?
Sometimes we are really comfortable in our own sins that we can’t see that we really are the ones in the way of us receiving and feeling his love.
Our pride and our anxiety are the ones who keep us from feeling loved because we are scared to let go of what we are comfortable with in exchange for the unknown. But when we let go of the known for the unknown, WOW. It’s better than you can ever know.
It’s life changing. It’s pivoting. And it doesn’t happen in one night.
Every day for the rest of my life I will have to lay down my pride and sins to pick up the cross to fight the good fight of faith. To not listen to the lies or schemes of the devil. To not fall into his temptation. But to LISTEN and FOLLOW God.
And it’s not easy. It’s not a one and done type of thing. It’s not a fairy tale or some romanticized type of love.
No. Love is not always romantic. Sometimes it can be, but mostly it is a choice.
A choice to say that I or you as a human cannot exist or function on our love. That we cannot fully love one another on our own accord. We cannot fully give our all to each other without the love of Jesus at the center.
That to love each other, to love God, is a choice. A choice that lessens you and increases God.
As we decrease, He increases.
A choice that transforms and changes our lives.
I recently read a book by Donald Miller called Scary Close, and he used a beautiful analogy of what love looks like and I wanted to share it with you all.
“I no longer believe love works like a fairy tale but like farming. Most of it is just getting up early and tilling the soil and then praying for rain. But if we do the work, we just might wake up one day to find an endless field of crops rolling into the horizon. In my opinion, that’s even better than a miracle. I’d rather earn the money than win the lottery because there’s no joy in a reward unless it comes at the end of a story.”
My prayer for you all is that you receive God’s love, but that you realize that it is choice… a choice to love and be loved.
Romans 8:38-39
