To Love as God Loves

Coming back to a post I began a month ago. A month! I have much to share with you about that month, but before all that, this, which flows into and provides context for the that.

Gentle Reader,

I stare into the mirror. An ordinary-looking woman meets my gaze. The afternoon light shifts, highlighting the gold tones in her brown eyes and the red in her brown hair. She looks a little tired, but she always looks a little tired. There’s something else about her face today. A sadness. A weariness.

Time is short, my dears. The days seem to stretch on, but before we know it the clock winds down and the alarm sounds. Breath, God-given and sustained, leaves a loved one’s chest. The spirit flies into eternity, waiting for the day when the Father tells the Son to go and fetch His Bride.

And so I think we have not minutes to waste in petty squabbling. Yes, some hills are worth dying on. I may be mostly a gentle puffball, but I’ve enough of a fighter in me to know that to be true. But most of the things we spend energy on, the conflicts that rob us of both peace and sleep, are pointless. Useless. Do not, in any way, impact the grand scheme.

Perhaps we can choose a holy way of expending the energy and passion that fuels these fights. Perhaps we can throw ourselves, body and soul, into love. Loving the way that God does, something beyond affection and deeper than preference. The kind of love that means something. Costs something. The sort of love that we all ache for in the middle of the night.

Romance is not dead, my darlings. It is greater than the longing glances exchanged by couples in cheesy movies, more than eroticism. Romance is the deep mystery, the grand adventure, found in walking with Jesus. He beckons. He calls. He woos.

Then, somehow, He creates a family out of the called.

Like any family, we are dysfunctional.

But we’re still family.

And so our language must be seasoned with love and tempered with grace, for these are brothers and sisters, beloved ones, with whom we interact. Do you realize that? Do I? God calls us His beloved. Are we that kind of community? One that operates out of belovedness? Beloved of Him, beloved of each other?

What if we cared? Really, truly, cared? Paused and actually listened to that prayer request, and prayed then and there? Laughed with each other? Cried with each other? Were all up in each other’s business, not out of mere curiosity or nosiness but because that’s what people who love each other do?

There is a radical quality to the love of God, a quality that I begin to see is passed on and pressed into those who call upon His Name. The sort of sacrificial, selfless love modeled by Christ is ours to learn and share with the world. We do not drum up this love within ourselves by force or will. No, it arises instead out of time spent at the feet of Jesus. Sometimes that looks like hours of quiet contemplation. Sometimes that looks like a full day with hardly any room to breathe. Sometimes that looks like something in between the lull and the busy. But it always looks like a person devotedly – not perfectly – seeking the Savior’s will.

What an impact we might have upon this place, if we loved as He loves!