Heather's Journal #101 - NO TITLE. August 22, 2008. Heather questions what it means to Love God.

101

No Title

August 22, 2008

“I don’t care what they say cuz I’m in love with you.  They try to pull me away but they don’t know the truth.  My heart’s crippled by the vein that I keep closing.  You cut me open and I, keep bleeding, keep bleeding love.” (SOURCE?)

I’ve dangerously questioned myself in my thoughts for a while.  I say I’m in love with God, that I’m completely devoted to my Lord Jesus Christ but am I really?  Am I so in love with Him that  I’d sacrifise anyone or anyone for Him?  Could I stand here & say that if absolutely everything was stripped away from me that it wouldn’t matter as long as I had the love of my life guiding me from above? 

I think I’d like to believe I was in love w/ God.  And I do love Him, don’t get me wrong but I think I have a heck of a lot more feet to fall in love with God. 

I wanna be so in love w/ Him that nothing else matters.  Where it hurts because it’s all I can think about.  I want to be deeply in love w/ Him. 

For so long I thought I  was but I don’t think I’m even close.  All of my bf’s Ive gone through I was just hoping someone would  catch me… I guess I was just scared or something but this time, I wanna fall fast.  And I don’t want anyone to catch me until I fall into the hands of God himself at the end of my life.  I wanna spend the rest of my life on earth falling in love with God.

i will love you.

In Christ,

Heather Lee

Dear Heather,

Love is such a powerful emotion.  You also seem to like romance, which is the idea that love is beautiful.  That is makes you feel beautiful.  It fills a space that longs for connection.  God describes love in 1 Corinthians. Love is patient.  Love is kind.  Love …  But we have commercialized the concept of love so much that we have diluted its real power.  People read that verse at weddings and funerals and we imagine that it should be like that – but most of the time it feels impossible to GIVE love the same way we would like to RECEIVE love.  It’s not that we don’t want to love fully and wholeheartedly – it’s that at our core we are mostly selfish and we only tend to give love that way when we feel some benefit in return.  It is really really hard to be patient.  To be kind…. All the time. 

Seriously, we can all do it sometimes, but can you really say you or anyone you know can do it all the time?  I know that I struggle with that.  I don’t want to be that way.  But I think I am.  And I’m not sure that I will ever be able to fully overcome that until I get to Heaven and experience perfect love.

Think about it.  Life is really about conflict.

We are a people who understand stories.  We live stories.  We comprehend stories.  

Remember when I taught you history?  I told you my definition of history:  It is the study of man’s reactions to certain events over time.  

I begin the class by saying that the truth is man hasn’t really changed.  Our knowledge has.  Our technology has.  Our skills have.  But our souls and spirit have not.  Our will has not.  Our sin has not.  Man is no more or less sinful than he was in the Beginning.  

And history repeats itself because humans are human. They are selfish and greedy and hypocritical and daring and intelligent.  They are also loving and caring and committed and thoughtful.  And a whole lot more things. 

So, in the end, I say history is the study of man’s reactions to certain events because the events change – but we don’t.  We have different reactions at different times, but history offers us nothing new about humans.  Only about the events we encounter. 

People say we have to learn history so that we don’t repeat the mistakes. Which is true on an individual level.  One person or a group of people can study past mistakes and avoid future ones.  Or even copy good things.  But ultimately, humans can’t do that except through God. And as long as we have the freedom to choose – humans – as a group -  will always act out of their perceived self interest – at least some of the time. 

I feel like a philosophy teacher right now.  Some of this may be over your head, but I want you to hear it over and over again because eventually you will have an “ah ha’ moment and this will make perfect sense to you. 

And just to be clear, I’m not complaining or being negative about humans.  That would be kind of a slap in the face to God.  Afterall, he created all the possiblities!  On the contrary, I’m trying to explain to you why you might keep coming back to the same point over and over again.  The point at which you want to be different but find yourself in constant conflict with yourself and the world.  The point at which you might want to give up, but you can’t because God created in you a sense of hope that keeps you going even when you want to quit.

I was re-reading one of my favorite books called “Blue Like Jazz” by Donald Miller.  He talks about about his faith (and sometimes lack of faith) in a real down to earth way.  He said what I say, but in different words.  He was out protesting some really important social issue of the day and suddently he realized that he had no business protesting the big issues when he wasn’t affecting change at his own church or in his own community – where he could actually do something.  Not to say that protesting was bad, just that he realized his own inadequacies while trying to tell someone else theres. 

That happens to me a lot.  Like while I’m writing to you I figure out my own problems. 

Anyway, he quotes C.S. Lewis – one of the most philosophical and down to earth thinkers of our time.  C.S. Lewis – the same guy who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia – faces his own shortcomings in this poem he wrote:

"All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.

I never had a selfless thought since I was born.

I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through;

I want God, you , all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, reassurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,

I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin;

I talk of love – a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek –

But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin."

So, I guess you are in good company.  Me.  Don Miller.  C.S. Lewis.  You.  We all are challenged by love.  We want more than we seem able to either give or receive.

And all that is true about real love.  But I think love is balanced.  

Now God offers us perfect love.  The kind described in Corinthians. But we don’t know how to receive the love he gives because we can’t really give it at the same level.  Maybe we can’t receive it because we don’t feel worthy.  I don’t know.

I love you.  As best I can.

Mom