002. Oh Love, Don’t Pass By Me
Hey you,
Did you ever think you believed one thing, and found out you actually believed something entirely different? I used to pooh-pooh the idea, but I’m beginning to see that as hard as I’ve dug and investigated and confronted and enjoyed life, that I’ve fallen victim to myself more than I’ve been a victim anywhere else.
One of these areas is in being single past my expiration date. That didn’t particularly bother me until one day, whoosh, it showed up and became something I had to wrangle and wrestle. Now in all the kinds of wrangling and wrestling that sound fun, figuring out why you cannot seem to get something you want is the worst. In the old days my policy was simple: figure out how not to want it. I figure there are two camps of people in this world. The ones who go after what they want with everything they’ve got and become a slave to their wants, and the ones who figure out how to want other things and become a slave to their thoughts.
I was definitely the latter. Have you been stuck in your head before? A definite mental case, and like suddenly becoming a choice paralytic. Choice is life, and few things about being a human are more distressing than being stuck somewhere you don’t want to be. I don’t know about you but I panic and flail about making bad decisions that don’t serve me or the situation. Getting stuck in our heads leads us to perceive threats that may not always be actual threats.
The only way I’ve found of getting out is to take risks, because being stuck in our heads is primarily about self-protection. We don’t want to be hurt again, or fail, or be inadequate.
I find the question of figuring out what I want to be an interesting one, particularly romantically. If you’ve been single any number of years one of your greatest enemies is idealism. You’ve had time to set up fictional loves galore and eventually those all morph into some god-like creature that cannot exist, and if it did, would wreak havoc in the known and unknown worlds.
In a writing workshop a few years ago the teacher said that every good story must do one thing. It must bring the main character in an arc from what they wanted to what they needed. That stuck with me. I started thinking of all my favorite stories. In one of those, a character named Nadine falls in love with an artist but she has a problem. She is married to another guy: less sensitive and somewhat plodding, but an amazing guy nonetheless. He loves her and he is a good dad. She has to make the choice between what she perceives will fill her deepest needs and make her happy, or remain true to character, integrity, and her family.
It’s a sharp struggle, and one the story portrays exceedingly well. She chooses the road of self-denial, and finds true life with her husband.
In the past I’ve faintly resented stories like this. Just once can’t you have your cake and eat it too? Why couldn’t she already be married to a man who is everything? There’s a fine thread of a line between settling when you marry, and not expecting your spouse to be everything. To be honest, every time I came up against my expectations of love it depressed me to think of marrying someone I didn’t have a certain kind of feelings about — to be even more honest I still want that, but I’ve found that feelings don’t quite work as I think they do. They’re feelings. Not thoughts.
In today’s culture there’s very little reason to get married without romance because it’s not a practical or social exchange as it used to be. Everyone has their own job and independence and freedom and calling, why go to all the messy business of getting married if you can be yourself and stay unmarried? For the Lord of course. Gosh, if I had a dollar for every single person who has used that as a kind of holy excuse for not getting married when they still aren’t doing anything more than living a life that would be perfectly conducive to marriage. Do forgive me the blunt speech, or don’t.
Sometimes we just feel stuck, like it’s impossible to find a love that we want to die for, or who will want to die for us. I’m finding that when I feel stuck in a situation that usually the problem isn’t that I’m actually stuck, it’s that my feelings got log-jammed somewhere and I don’t want to take the hard road of follow-through to untangle them.
It’s easier to make excuses and justify my position, and maybe talk about all the good the Lord can do through a single person. The truth is though, that marriage is no better road for sanctification than singlehood, and singlehood isn’t serving the Lord any better if we refuse to die to self. The Gospel works because there are humans who are willing to give up everything. But that’s really hard. Does life really need to be dull? Do we always have to feel bad, or nothing? Is what our culture says true, that you can either have commitment and covenant, or romance? Is Christianity, or romance, only ever about dry, bland and cold logic or do I get to have the happy feelings too?
I think humans are wired to find the differences between things but bad at understanding them when we do. We’re so one-track that we assume that love is either all about receiving or giving. It’s neither, and both. Love is first. That’s very different from a directional understanding and becomes more of a core condition. We’ve had some thousands of years with 1 Corinthians 13 as a guide and yet bogus ideas about how sacrifice and love work together are everywhere. They definitely were in me, because I still assumed that you could either choose sacrifice or to be happy. I didn’t know that sacrifice makes you the most joyful person in the world.
When it came to romantic love I definitely fell into the sequencing fallacy: attraction > magic and happy feelings > get to know them > love > commitment. If everything falls into place then I know it is the right thing.
There’s a little something to that, because attraction is a metric that helps us distinguish someone we could work with, though it’s also worth mentioning that when we don’t know our own hearts well we are sometimes attracted because of something in the other person that we think will strengthen our own weak spots in character or personality. It’s why quite a few people don’t end up marrying their “type” because our type is a bit of a fluid concept in a process of growth. My married friends tell me that it is better to find someone who is willing to grow, because character and personality questions tend to even out in growth.
At any rate, my point is that when it comes to marriage, attraction and getting to know someone’s character is important — I’m not trying to diminish the importance of the choice at all. What I am bringing into question is whether or not love is as linear of a process as we think, because for one, everyone is so different. Two, there’s only so much you can be certain about before trusting another person, and you will never be certain that they will not hurt you or cause pain. My relationship with God has certainly been that way. I’ve chosen to trust him even when the possibility for suffering and being hurt again is at 100%, but I trust that even in the hurt that he means good for my life. In marriage and in friendship we have to do the same, but unlike God’s goodness which we are reasonably sure about, humans tend to hurt us.
Because of that tendency to hurt and be hurt, and for things left alone to deteriorate (thanks thermodynamic physics, for that suggestion) three is one I find most interesting of all, and that is that we can expect feelings to waver. When humans rub on each other the wrong way as all humans do whether or not they are in love, or they don’t put the work in and the relationship starts to disintegrate, we have to decide whether or not to keep our love on, as Danny Silk would say. It’s not a process beyond us, because self-control is a Biblical principle. If we don’t get past our feelings to put in the work relationships don’t make it.
Maybe the question of whether love is feelings or choice is like the questions that run like two parallel train tracks. They merge in the distance but run parallel in the present. Is love found or built? I am passionate about love being a choice, as you will see in this article. On the other, I don’t want love to be something that I “control.” You know? There’s this kind of delightful “beyond us” aspect to life and love that creates magic and which I don’t want to do without. The ancient Greeks or Romans would call it fate or destiny, but I personally think it’s a sovereign God who loves to work good, and because he’s so much bigger and his ways are higher so he can do something and we say, “wow, that’s amazing, look how God works! God is so good to me!” It works the other way in us humans too and we call his sovereignty bad things too.
We want to fall in love, and experience this magic that seems completely beyond us and at which we can’t screw up. At some point though, we all do, even with the people we love very much. It’s like the honeymoon period wearing off in marriage and we find that we must choose to love this person against or with the tides of how we feel about them. We are not “victims” to love.
We find, after all, that we must steward love, as well as experience it. It’s in our care. When we find it, it is a newborn fledgling and it depends on us to keep it alive, but we do almost by instinct. We pour into it through our very life as mothers and fathers and feed it constantly and sleep with it. As it starts to grow, say about four sleep-deprived and giddy months in, that this thing has a personhood. It wants things. It demands things. Around two-years-old, we really discover it is not innocent. It has a will, a temper, and a mind of its own. It wants independence. It wants to prioritize its own things.
I submit to you that many of us are not very good at raising love. We’re not terribly good at loving when we don’t feel inspired or good about it. When it takes straight up discipline and character to continue to love. More and more people in this current time are too scared or reluctant to get married and raise kids. I don’t mean this as a sort of raking over the coals but just that it’s a statistical fact. People, when they do have kids have less of them, and complain about them more. It’s hard.
Yeah. It’s hard. Life is hard. We might be a little insulated to that fact in our current times, but it is. Jesus said it’s not if we face hard times, it’s when.
When I can’t understand something I’m learning to look at my own heart and see what’s there before I try to extract a beam in someone else’s heart. It’s led to me eating lots of humble pie. For example, I would say that we do need to learn how to put ourselves in hard situations where we have to sacrificially love, but then I was the one who considered giving up a ministry effort I’m part of just because it didn’t match the metrics I wanted to see. I didn’t feel good about it. Thank God he has been teaching me things about what we do when we don’t feel good about things before we make life-altering decisions about them.
My failures in the past year, relationship and otherwise, have flipped my notions of self-sacrificial love on its head. To me it’s not romantic love, friendship love, or church love or world love or poor people love anymore. I simply see love that flows out in whatever relationships we are engaging in, and as the direct result of approaching life with the willingness to die. If we are not dying to life, we won’t die to self or love or romantic partners or children or church either. “Love does not alter where it alteration finds” is one of the truest things Shakespeare wrote.
It took me awhile to get this concept through my head to my heart. I’ve sort of always known that love to be love, is sacrificial in nature, but didn’t know how much deeper, richer, and kinder it is once your own heart experiences it. It’s not just a matter of not getting to feel happy things. It’s what happens when we make the hard choices and find that life just got unbelievably rich and wonderful.
In 2019 I made the executive decision to confront a murky mess of loneliness, depression and anxiety inside me. It was not as if they had overtaken my life, just always there lurking in the shadows, waiting to pounce. I had a severe bout with depression as a teenager, in conjunction with family dysfunction that had shut me down until what I call the Great Reawakening a few years back. During the interim there was a lot of growth and learning and stabilizing spiritually but not so much emotionally. Emotions still felt like a wild, unpredictable thing to me, and I was happy to stay my calm and collected self. Numb, sure, but it was manageable.
Plus I didn’t know I was numb. This was just always who I had been. Calm, peacemaker. Mediator, rational. I used to boast that I cried maybe once a year. Why I thought that was something to boast about is beyond me now, other than perhaps that gave me an illusion of strength. I wasn’t strong. No one is who avoids inner (sometimes outer) fights. You are only as strong as your weakest point, and most of us see our emotions as weak.
My starting point came when I realized that no matter how “close” I got to people I felt alone. Cut off. Not ever satisfied or happy, even though everything lined up on paper. I had good friendships, and enjoyed them, but something was missing. I started to ask harder questions. Was I truly alone if I felt alone? Was that just a feeling? Was that a reality? If I feel bad, is that a truth or a true thing or something I needed to just override?
“I feel lonely.”
For many years I was neither happy or unhappy. If asked, I erred on the side of unhappiness just to be sure I wasn’t *spits and throws salt over shoulder, hexing myself. Though I was convinced I was a rational, logical creature I was in reality a superstitious and fearful Christian, driven by this sense that my feelings were untrustworthy. If you don’t pay attention to your feelings, you will think your feelings and get stuck in your head.
Our desires lead us astray. I locked mine down until I didn’t feel much or care much about anything. I remember thinking one time that if I died no one would really grieve. They would not grieve for me because I did not ever grieve for anyone.
Soon after I moved to NC someone invited me to play piano at a conference, and attend it for free. I had an attitude about the conference. I was skeptical of it, and too proud to acknowledge why I was skeptical. During a talk about the Father’s Love, God moved in my heart and I lost it. Blubbering, ugly crying, publicly lost it. To my calm and cool self this was the worst humiliation. Cry in front of everyone? I didn’t need to be here! This place was for broken people. People who needed help. I helped people, I was not the one to be helped.
It was here I received my first lesson of what it means to truly fall in love: facing the places where one has felt unloved. I realized that day that I had never dealt with the dysfunction in my family. Not really. I had acknowledged it but also glossed over it. I had thought about it plenty, but never grieved it. That day I grieved. Much against my will, but a roaring flood cleaned out a place in me and I began to understand God as something more than distant or theological love. He became a Father to me in a way that I couldn’t accept until I had lost it.
“I feel hurt. I feel out of control.”
Something changed in me that day. I became a little more soft, a little more open. Pride had gotten a chink in the armor. I began to hear the Pied Piper’s song leading me toward a destruction in the heart of me. I couldn’t resist, and slowly began to make my way to the Shadowlands. I had no emotional resilience to speak of yet, so the process was slow. Before I could face my worst fears, my personhood needed some building up. I needed to know who I was. Some people call this self-knowledge. I don’t. You can know all about yourself and still not inhabit your own heart. You have to begin to know yourself, and this can only go in pace with knowing God and letting people know you. Those three work together, they cannot be separated much as the Trinity cannot be separated.
This set into motion something which I referred to earlier as “The Great Awakening.” That was six years ago.
Then one day I talked about myself for half an hour straight with a friend. I did not do that before. That was hard, and is hard for anyone who is accustomed to being the unofficial “therapist” in relationships. I really had to work hard to let go of that identity, and I did it by putting myself in a place of need with other people. The self-sufficiency, the links which held the armor of pride together, also began to slip and loosen.
“I feel exposed.”
In 2018, the time for a decision had come. I had come as far as I could with my community and church. You can “date” a person or group of people for awhile but this is meant to be temporary. We are meant to commit, to be in covenant. Spiritually I had learned to place more trust in God, to learn to know him. Now it was time to follow that up with action in regards to the people around me. I had been badly burned by church, but after a period of healing (I still attended church, just hadn’t committed) it was time. Full healing does not happen outside a context of people who know you intimately. You cannot separate yourself with any good results, except for a short time. Paul talks about that with husbands and wives, but it applies in a wider arena. If you separate, do it mutually and only for a time. You must come back together. The church of God must not neglect meeting together. Friends must not neglect one another.
I had just gotten a series of rejections to join flight attendant school, which considering Covid now looks like the mercy of God to me. At the time, it was a “now what?” opportunity. ‘Now what’ moments are deciding moments. They might lead to truly bad decisions, or they might lead to the best decisions of your life. Much is dependent on these moments. People have killed themselves in these moments, and others have found life in these moments.
My process for decision making is instinctual. I lean on logic and emotion some, but mostly just go with my gut. If God had placed a church in front of me, it only made sense to go all-in and see if this was really a place of belonging for me. I was still so lonely, even in the middle of all my wonderful friendships. It wasn’t my friends fault, I knew it was something inside me.
The factors to not commit were plentiful. Everyone says they want a church where people are actually broken and not pretending to be whole, but when given that opportunity find every reason to go find a place that won’t confront their own brokenness. Still, I couldn’t shake the sense that God was calling me here, and to this worship team. Worship has been a calling on my life since I was very young. It was prophesied over me, and the gifts that God gave me were lined up. I was only lacking two things: the love of being on stage, and the willingness to commit.
I faced both those fears.
I said, “Ok, one year.” I’m going to give this church all I’ve got for one year. I buckled down, and served most of the Sundays of that year on the worship team. It wasn’t easy, with a lot of growing pains around larger church drama. We were still recovering from a pastor being found sexually immoral. It was tough not to just bounce and go find a place to start over where I didn’t know the background issues and problems. Where it would be good for me, and not where I had to do good. Where I could live my dreams (which for many of us is code for being around people who make dreams happen). Dreams by osmosis, or something like that.
Something strange happened. I fell in love with my church. I began to love these people as I had never loved before. I began to be vulnerable with them. I began to actually trust authority and leadership again. Through a really painful relationship rupture with friends, I placed my stake into the ground and said “I will die on this hill.” It was deeply painful for me because friends had already left the church and there was every possibility that more would go.
It is important to note that I did not make the decision to die for this church, but the decision to pursue truth at all costs. This is the priority that we all have to have in order to actually endure. If we commit to a place or people or person it must be for truth and love, or we will not make it. We’ll deny Jesus before the cock crows thrice.
True love is found on the stone of commitment and sacrifice. If you are asking what will be good for you, it is the wrong question. You must ask if this is a place where you can love mercy, do justly, and walk with God.
I stood for truth though it brought personal anguish, and that decision changed my life. In being willing to forfeit loyalty for truth, it laid a foundational community for me which seemed completely backward. If loyalty wasn’t my first priority how could anyone trust me? It turns out standing for truth even when it hurts is the real trust builder. There’s something that happens when the world sees that someone is making the choice to die to self and not for it. Trust is built. The true kind. It’s magic. It’s incredible.
I had no idea how that decision to lead love with commitment would change everything about the next few years. You cannot stay in commitment with people or a person unless you are willing to face your own issues. It just won’t happen. The people who can’t face themselves in these cases often mysteriously find compelling reasons to move on. In one sense that is ok, because God does not give up on us. His kindness leads us to repentance. I’ve been in that place of moving on too, and even at the 11th hour there is hope for the person who is running. It is important to know that when we run, we leave a trail of broken or suffering relationships that will take us that much longer to unpack once we decide to face ourselves, but it is equally important to know that it is possible. For anyone. If you have never been held in the weakest, most ugly and awful moments of your life you do not know yet what bliss awaits you.
To be forgiven, you must forgive. To fall in love, you must love first. Scripture doesn’t say you wait to feel love. You do love. God made us. He knows how we work, and we work inside love.
it is not dependent on other people to “inspire” it. Love is sacrificial. It waits on no one and bears everything with patience. “We love him because he loved us first.”
Love is first. It always is. You lead with love and you will be loved. You lead with love and you will fall in love.
But none of this is possible if you will not let the Lord do what he does and heal you. The word used for “salvation” in many references of the NT also means “healing.” You will not be saved if you refuse to heal. The way to bitterness, cynicism and despair lies that way. This truth is equal parts humility and wonder.
Do forgive me. I’m a preacher at heart.
My most recent adventure in this department of love changed everything about how I view falling in love. I knew that commitment and sacrifice brings about health and freedom. But I never thought that it was as all-conquering as it turned out to be. I didn’t know that my feelings were of any consequence. Where I grew up we were taught foundational principles about character, but not on how that character and decision to self-deny will surround our feelings with gentleness. I thought that feelings were second-rate.
When I broke up from a dating relationship I was shocked by the level of emotional support that I received from my community. My feelings were cared for, gently handled and not once did someone say something which hurt me. This strikes me as unusual. I don’t know what to make of it.
After the accident the support accelerated and became physical and mental as well. They held me up, sometimes literally, and cried and prayed with me. They loaned cars because I didn’t have collision insurance when I thought I did. They sent money. They brought food. They texted and called. They went with me to pick up my phone after the police held it in evidence for a month. I never felt isolated. I was not alone. Their love was faithful, even beyond the church family to the larger body of Christ, and beyond. Everyone from the attorney, the police, the wrecker driver, the auto shop, the body shop, and insurance people were so kind that I sat around with my mouth open half the time. I could not believe it, and while all of it was the provision of God, some was extra care from him because the auto shop lady where the car was first taken and held by the police, didn’t know me at all and went out of her way to call the police for me and get the car released. The attorney who advised me, after a conversation said “I know it’s raining outside so I can’t prove the sun is shining, but it is and you’re going to be ok.”
I knew that this community which I had spent years dying for, serving, and loving was bearing me up, but these extra people, they had no reason to want to help me. What on earth was going on? How, in a time that I spent mostly in anguish, was everyone so incredible? No one told me to suck it up. No one mentioned kindly that everyone suffers and I’m not such a special case. At every turn, I was met with so much kindness. It was wholly unexpected.
I have been able to recognize only one true answer: God is love. He is love when we are not, and he is love when we are. His ways and principles work. His law is solid. His grace is infinite. But, here is a plot twist.
God’s laws are not meant to be based on whether or not we can get the results we want. We have to do it in peril of losing everything.
A relationship earlier this year pitched me head first into confronting my notions on what romance is. I laid down a lot of my 20-year-old expectations. When one starts a dating relationship as thirty-something strangers it is fraught with more risk than usual. There’s little background, no history. It’s ground zero, and both are just a wee bit more inflexible. Not quite so ready to change life entirely for another person.
It was a struggle, but fun.
Several months into the relationship I knew something had shifted, and panicked. My boyfriend was no longer into it as he had been. Neither of us had been head-over-heels, which is to be expected if two rational people meet as strangers, but something changed. I had seen the hand of God in this, had I not? Had he not gone before us every step of the way?
Several weeks into fighting off the fear the Lord said to me: Lyn, why do you withhold declaring my goodness based on results of a relationship?
Oof. I wanted to argue that I was doing things his way. That he owed me something. That love works. But I had put my hand to the plow and wouldn’t turn back now. God’s message to me came at exactly the right time. Instead of being driven by fear, I kept doing exactly what I have done for years. My training stood me in good stead. I declared that God was good, and let go of the results as often as was needed. In doing that I had to take my need for certainty completely out of play and only plant my stake in God’s goodness. Even when I definitely didn’t feel like any of this was probably going to feel good. The risk and probability of failure was getting higher all the time.
“God, you’re good, even if I’m hurt.”
I’m scared.
I obeyed. I will forever be grateful for trusting him in the middle of watching things fall apart. It’s hard to get pushed outside someone’s life, with little-to-no explanation. They have the right to do that, but it was painful to see something valuable go up in smoke.
A few weeks before the relationship terminated a friend and I were talking and she said “Oh! I had a dream about you two!” But when she learned that things were bumpy she wisely kept the prophetic nature of this silent and let it play out. After the breakup I went back and asked her about it. She said that in the dream she asked about the relationship and I said with a big smile, “we broke up.” She was puzzled. How was this a time for smiling? She said she asked why the smile, and dream me immediately followed up with “because I have seen the goodness of God.”
Cue all the goosebumps. I had obeyed God, and the reward was high. It was then the realization hit me. It had worked. There is something magical that happens when you sell everything, everything, to trust and goodness and love. Even at peril of all personal comfort or getting to feel good. You find treasure. In all that was painful, I felt no shame and no regret. God was very kind too. He kept leading me gently on, and encouraging me to trust and let go. That time was hard, but precious to me. God never left me or even once got harsh because I couldn’t control my feelings. He only said that I must keep trusting and choose to love as best as I could in the middle of things falling apart. This was not just a romantic interest. This man was a brother in Christ. If I treated him badly I would most certainly answer for it to God.
I struck gold.
Because the relationship ended, this treasure isn’t visible from the outside, but it is priceless nonetheless. This is the treasure: love does. It is a choice which begins in the heart. In all I have learned the past few years about the magic of commitment to hard things (obviously levels of commitment vary), I never personally walked it out in a potential romantic interest. That was in a category by itself, yeah? Like I mentioned before the “love is choice” was part two for me. I thought one first experiences love and then based on those feelings (and whether they are negative or positive) choose to stay in it. That’s backwards. Some people do experience infatuation or a crush in a relationship first (this can happen in friendship too) but what love is actually based on is choice. Period. It’s the fulcrum of all of life, and it is why it is so important to build good character, pursue inner healing, and learn how relationships work. Not because falling in love is the crown of all life experiences, but because the way we live life and who we are directly changes how we fall in love. How we live, is how we love.
If we bring freedom and aliveness and personal ownership to it we will likely be head-over-heels in love because we already are head-over-heels for life.
It unlocked a major piece of the puzzle for me. If we think love is romance (basically good feelings about someone else on steroids and sexual drive) it makes sense that a little way into marriage, when confronted with reality, that we feel the illusion shattered. This isn’t always going to make me feel good? I have to actually decide to love this person? Suddenly we have to do what we have no strength to do: go against the tide of our feelings and choose another person above ourselves. Everything about the way our culture teaches love is the opposite. We say that if the other person makes us feel happy than this is the real deal. We don’t like to think about the “love first” part of this deal. We want to be loved first.
Every married person I’ve run this by who has navigated at least a few years of married life say the same thing.
“Yes.”
It’s like writing. If you wait for inspiration you will wait forever. You’ll be jerked around by every feeling. But when you determine to write anyway a surprising thing happens: you engage in the writing. You’re interested. You’re satisfied with it. You begin to live it and get starry eyes over it.
Love is the same way. If you wait for it to just “happen” and for it to inspire and make you feel good it will jerk you around endlessly. No one will ever make you happy long term. No romance, church, job, friendship… and certainly not your own life.
You choose to love, and then you do. C.S. Lewis says this whole thing about how to love your neighbor is baffling. You don’t figure out how. You act as if you do, and then you will.
That seems so coldly mathematical, but the implications for this are earth-shattering. Imagine a world in which we choose to love because we know love, and still get to have feelings. In fact, now those feelings can be exactly what they are. No more depending on them to give us love, or to give us strength and structure.
Negative emotions and feelings will always try to sway our course. They’re meant to inform us of our position. But, things like anxiety and doubts are not meant to call the shots. They hurt pretty much everyone including ourselves when we let them take choice-making power instead of listening as we ought, caring for ourselves in those feelings, and then making a choice. Some of us who were parented in a more stoic home have difficulty knowing how little we know how to care for our feelings properly, and with gentleness. Knowing, at the same time, that our feelings ought not to become our dictators, jerking us around according to our hungers and fears and doubts.
A good parent listens to their child in distress, but knows they still might not get the thing they think they want. The parent knows what the child needs might be a nap, but that doesn’t mean those feelings of the world falling apart aren’t legitimate. Feelings and emotions are the barometer we need to know when it’s time to take care of ourselves, and once we have done that we are in a position to make a better choice. Many, many times over the past few months when I felt utterly out-of-control or overwhelmed the Holy Spirit has asked me how I feel. I’m shaking my fist to the sky, weeping and gnashing my teeth because I can’t understand something, but he is saying I don’t have to understand right now. I have to feel right now. Get down on the floor and feel it out. When I obeyed, the comfort was incredible. Our God knows what we need, and he stands ready to parent us with so much gentleness.
We actually take our cues from the King of Heaven. His feelings were expressed in the Garden of Gethsemane, to his Father. He was in agony, and he knew the path he was on and where it would end. He didn’t just grit his teeth and shut up. He talked through the agony. He asked his friends why they weren’t there for him. He needed them. He needed to talk about it and have someone with him. He prayed through it. He ended with the choice to face death through surrender to the will of God and not his own feelings.
He is love. He is the I AM.
We follow in his footsteps, and this means death, so that we can truly live, but it does not now or ever mean silence or isolation. We are not meant to walk alone. Because of this, we know it’s worth it to risk everything to find love.
Usually we have to figure out how to put ourselves back into positions where we can be hurt again. Not blindly, but through choice after choice to trust. Those choices and the ensuring feelings and triggers are going to tell us exactly where we need to heal. It’s really magical in all its mess, and so precise it’s annoying.
Enduring power comes when your heart is on board and your hands and feet carry it out. When you are making the choices not to let anxiety and depression and past hurts dominate. When you decide that love is your choice and you can love someone when not everything is magical. We do not need to be afraid of pain and not getting what we want. I know from experience it makes the heart sick, it really does, but the cure is not being delivered into good situations, but being healed on the inside. To be healed, we have to start talking about our feelings. They are the most vulnerable thing we have, and must not be given to just anyone.
In the end this is how we love one another. Not in our feelings, which are the result of love, but in the very nature and personhood of the other person. I don’t regret the dating relationship, though it did end poorly, because it was based in what I believed about his character and person, and the fact that we could laugh at and enjoy the same things. It wasn’t just a cold choice, but when things got difficult I didn’t let the fear guide me, but walked straight into it declaring the goodness of God. I certainly didn’t feel that goodness. I just made the choice to believe it. I don’t know if I got that right, but I was astonished to find that I did not get knocked around by doubts or fear that maybe he wasn’t the right person. We didn’t get married, but love doesn’t get wasted. Not the true kind.
But are you willing to be changed? That is the question, because dying to self looks an awful lot like dying to feelings and experiences and allowing them to mean something other than how we understood them. It means that we are much smaller in the grand scheme of things that we can imagine. It means that we assume ownership of our small corner and make no one responsible for our happiness. We cannot control someone else’s behavior and we might get hurt, oh yes, we will. There’s no if, and, or but.
At the end of the day if we have died to self and submitted to the fire, the fire burns away all but the true gold; the treasure that God has placed deep within our hearts. Only a few people find this, because not many are willing to go through this purification of becoming known.
It’s a rough path my friends, but I’ve never had so many adventures in my life as pursuing this treasure and this is only the beginning. There is a kingdom of heaven to bring to earth, and I’m part of that work. I’m not the whole puzzle, thank God, but I’m in this army and I don’t mind dying for it.
Will Smith said in a video about skydiving that God places the best things on the other side of fear. He’s absolutely right. What’s the worst that could happen? You could die, sure, but don’t fear death of the body. Fear death of the soul. Face that fear, and bring your whole heart to love. For me the worst thing was to find myself in a relationship of unrequited love, but it turns out that today I’m the possessor of great treasure. Whatever my next step in life, whomever I meet or marry or don’t marry, doesn’t matter. I know how to trust in uncertainty. Happiness is not getting what you want. It is getting what you need, and I needed to know that love is not dependent on anyone else. It can stand very well on its own two feet whether or not the person you are loving returns it. It’s like truth. It doesn’t need us to defend it, but it does ask us to die for it.
Falling in love is not an accident my friends. It is not happenstance or a cosmic exception. It is ordinary people serving a purpose beyond themselves, who find in the end that feelings are cherished, valued, and full of golden magic when they are not expected to be love but to follow it.
Love first.
“I feel peace.”
“love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things.”
L. Raine
Photo by Espolòn Tequila
