I find it hard to love God. It’s very easy for me to like God, to look at God with great admiration, and sometimes it’s even easy to pray to God. But to love Him is different. It demands more. It demands all of me. I think people toss the word “love” around so often that it has perhaps lost a bit of its punch. I say I love my friends, but I also say I love Hello Kitty. And while I do greatly enjoy Hello Kitty, I would not lay down my life for her. I would not go out on a limb and defend Hello Kitty. I would not invest my life in Hello Kitty. I would not try to make Hello Kitty feel loved and special because Hello Kitty is a cartoon cat and not someone I can laugh with, talk to, or just sit quietly with while watching Mulder and Scully fight forces of evil. When talking about my friends and Hello Kitty, I use the same word but it means two very different things.
When I say I love God, I wonder how often I truly mean it in the most basic, Webster-defined sense of the word. I don’t think you can love someone until you truly know him or her, and I know that I do not know God very well. But then again, I’m not sure how well anyone knows God. I’m not sure how much He allows us to see. I’m not sure how much any of us could actually handle seeing.
I hate the thought of hurting someone that I love. I go out of my way to avoid it. And when I know I have hurt them anyway, a bit of my heart hurts too because I know I made a bit of theirs also ache. I hate the thought of disappointing my earthly father, but when it comes to God, I daily make choices that I know must make Him grieve. Sometimes I make these choices without really thinking things through, but other times, most times, I think, I make them fully aware of my actions. I voluntarily hurt the One who left heaven for me.
As I’ve thought this through, I’ve wondered what the difference is. Why is it that I can love mere mortals more than I can love the creator of the universe? And I think that it is because in order to love someone, you also have to let him or her love you. And I am not often very good at letting God simply love me. As I thought about this further, I began to believe that I am not the only one.
I was thinking about John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart in which he discusses what men and women often look like inside the church. He described many as tired, without passion, still, good but dull. I have to wonder if these people, too, have trouble with letting God love them. Within the community of church, there is such emphasis on doing, on serving. And serving is indeed important, but I think it often gets placed on a higher shelf than it really should. There is such importance placed on doing things for God that I wonder how often we forget that God sometimes just wants us to sit still and let Him wow us. Sometimes I think He wants us to simply delight in Him and His miracles. There is this constant struggle to prove to God our goodness, to prove that we are strong and worthy and brave and beautiful. It’s a worthless cause, and I know it, but I very rarely stop. Love is easier when you’re busy doing, but it gets personal when the doing stops and the stillness sets in.
I think it’s a lot like a car ride with someone you don’t know very well. When you’re riding with someone you don’t quite yet feel fully comfortable with, there is this need to fill in the silence. This is this pressure to chat and make small talk to fill in the gaps. But after you’ve known a person for a while, the silence is no longer awkward. There is talking, but it’s not forced. The silence is not weird or abnormal. It feels fine, feels normal and natural.
Anyone who has step foot in church even once hears about the importance of prayer. Even people who don’t believe find themselves praying when life gets at its worst point. But I wonder how often I, and others, pray because of obligation instead of passion. Instead of a natural dialog with the Almighty, prayer becomes like the chatter inside the car with a stranger. Because of this emphasis on giving and doing, I wonder how much I have missed because there is so little emphasis on taking and silence.
Love is not easy, and if it feels easy, then I doubt it’s really love at all. Love is rich and passionate and the best of all things, but it demands that we look past the way things seem and examine the way things really are. It demands that we give, but it also demands that we take the goodness being offered us. It is in the taking we learn how love feels and work, what love looks like. The giving must come after the taking, the acceptance of love.
I have no idea if any of this made any sense at all, but I felt wordy. And when I feel wordy, it seems wrong to just deny the wordiness. : )
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