God + Us = LOVE
Posted on Sunday, February 15, 2009 by oneP3 | (0) Comments
God + Us= LOVE
By: Miriam
It’s funny how we have come to believe in the idea of
“falling in love.” I’m beginning to realize that nobody simply falls in love. Love is much more complicated, demanding and changing than that. It isn’t something that we haphazardly trip over as we go through life. Sorry Hollywood. The love story between God and His people throughout the Bible is a much more accurate depiction of love. It is rarely dreamy (and if it is, this phase ends quickly). Instead, it is a messy, painful, stretching and deeply meaningful choice that, in the end, is entirely worth it. Recently, Katie and I have recounted what we have learned about love along this journey. Here are our musings: We have walked through life experiences that have dissected our experience of love into its tiny, organic parts. The Lord has been faithful and gentle as He has walked us through this procedure, exposing for us the broken and selfishness of our own love, the faulty and unsubstantial love of others, the bitterly difficult choice to love. He held us when we realized that we would need to let go of this hard-earned, weathered love that we knew so well. The love that made us want to have children, that made us work tirelessly on ourselves and our marriages, the love that wouldn’t…no, couldn’t…give up. We understood what God meant when He said He hated divorce. We agonized under the violent dismembering of the one flesh. We asked God to relieve us from that love now. To cut the strings so that we could move on. We asked Him to change the love so that we can still honor the Lord and the fathers of our children. And He is faithful to do all of this, in His time, with our persistent cooperation. We have entered new stages now and we are continually learning about love. Katie is in a new relationship and I am remarried. The Lord has blessed us with honest, selfless, godly men who are showing us what it means to pursue God, us and our children. We see new angles to love now. Somethings are familiar and somethings are very different. We realize, once again, how much we fall short. We recognize that we will have to spend the rest of our lives marinating on God, who IS Love, in order to really “fall deeply in love.” We are sobered, but hopeful, no longer tossed along the sea of our emotions as easily (we hope!). We are willing to dig deeply into the Lord and choose love again. Love is so much more than we ever thought and it extends past our new relationships. Through our circumstances, God is teaching us how to love others well—our parents, our siblings, other single moms and abandoned women, others in all kinds of crises. We are confident that He is teaching us how to love our former husbands again. I am grateful for this painful, raw and thorough education on love. What it has lost in whimsy, it has made up for in depth. We know that loving others was, is and always will be a risk. But we know this for certain—God is Love. In the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis, speaking of Aslan (i.e. God), says it brilliantly. “Of course He isn’t safe! But He’s good.” Love isn’t safe, but it’s good. Walking through our tragic love stories was worth it because we have learned about God. We couldn’t know Him like we do now if we hadn’t walked that specific journey. No, we didn’t “fall in love.” We deliberately walked along side of Love until we, in some pathetic way, began to reflect Him. And now He’s teaching us how to love others.