An extraordinary thing
Love is the most extraordinary thing. I can't get my head around it. When I love someone, it depends on me, not on them (after all, "I love you" starts with "I"). It's me who has the love to do the loving with, not someone else who can somehow conjure it out of me. What does this matter? It means that I don't have to worry about whether someone 'deserves' love; I don't have to know everything about them, or even know them at all. And it means, too, that there is no such thing as 'unloveable'. But while love starts with what we have (where it comes from before we'll come to later on), and goes out from there, it changes things as it goes. When someone is loved and begins to realise it, something inside them expands and grows, and begins to become 'loveable'. They begin to fill their space, to be transformed from a shell, an idea of a person, into the real thing. The order of things is important here. We become more and more 'loveable' as we realise we are loved already. Loveability is the result, not the cause. You've come across this idea before, I'm sure - have you ever noticed that it's easier to find friends by being one, than by looking for them? Have you ever wondered why smiling makes you happy? An extraordinary thing!
There's a passage in the Bible that is quite well known, and talks about love:
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.
Love never fails.
Now that you've read that once, go through and read it again, but this time substitute your name for 'love', and he or she for 'it'. "Keri is patient... etc"
Did that feel like lying? Did it make you feel terrible inside? Convicted? Don't despair - the story doesn't end here! In fact, we have to go back a step or two before we can finish it off properly. We need to know where love comes from in the first place, because we can only love others because we have love in us to start with. We only have love in us to start with because we are, ourselves, loved. God loves us, and loved us first, so now we can love too. I think that the most overlooked, misinterpreted, cliched-out-of-all-perspective three words ever are "God loves me", but more about that next time. This time, instead of reading that passage with your name and feeling bad because you don't measure up, this time read it as a promise: this is God's love that the verse is speaking about, but as we let ourselves grow into the space that his love creates around us, we'll have more of his kind of love to share too. So, it becomes a promise, a hope for the future, an idea of what you - yes, little, fickle, silly old you - and I - yes, littler, fickler, sillier old me - can become. Just a thought, K :-)
- Posted by flyingkiwi on 29/03/2007.
- flyingkiwi's site
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