Recently I had a friend who told of their pastor saying how they had to live up to God’s standard or not be a Christian at all… I was crushed. To me that’s like me telling my son who is ten to give me straight A’s and get algebra passed and have his drivers license by next summer or he could stop calling himself by my last name. He is a child and he will learn, but he will learn quickly if I offer him more love than criticism. Call me crazy : ) This love thing… there’s a lot to it we don’t really have a grasp on.
I was listening to a song by Brandon Heath and one of the lines in the song says “I write about love and such, probably cause I want it so much”. I write a ton about love all the time probably for the same reason. Maybe I am deranged or off center here, but I’ve come to know God well enough to know he doesn’t make mistakes. God doesn’t call his people to walk in places in their lives where they have no purpose of being. I think for me God wants me to understand HIS heart about love. He wants us to know he loves us. He gives and wants our love in return. I talk about love myself for the same reason Brandon Heath talks about it…maybe it’s because I want it so much? But wanting love all your life, you learn the qualities of love. I know I know…duh… love is patient, love is kind etc, but I mean the purest quality of love. Love ALWAYS gives itself away. Love never sets itself up to be served. It always always always gives itself away.
I’ve learned God’s love for the church is not at all unlike the love a man has for a woman. It’s not a book of formulas, it’s not steps we can read in a book, It’s a mystery. It’s relational and for us to walk it out with God we must seek to walk it out like a new couple formulating their love in a relationship. You know what I mean right? Maybe its some woman who is eager to love someone and simply give her life to someone completely or a man who has nothing but a big heart full of life to give away and formulate a family and is ready to get on with it. They can’t just unload their emotions on the first date. I can just see some guy with chocolates and a ring and the waiter helping to make arrangements while they wait for his date and when the waiter says “so what does your future wife look like, can you imagine the look on his face when the guy says “oh I haven’t really met her yet” ?
God is a perfect gentleman. He is waiting for us to come to this relationship with him. He is ever so patient and when we are there, he tells us he loves us. He woos us with his kindness. He comes into our presence with a smile and gifts and peace and he isn’t rushed. He waits and sits and lets us enjoy that place as long as we desire. He is so slick at it, he allows us to make the moves and when get to the place where we are ready to fall in love with him and never want to leave his presence, he does it in such a way that we actually believe it was OUR idea the whole time. We talk to others about our new relationship as if God found us at the right time and we were just so ready to love him etc and he allows us to go on believing like that but if we were honest, we would realize he was there before the dawn of time just waiting for the day when he could rush in and love us.
Not long ago I was at the farm and as I was coming into the house from the truck, I was forced to park quite a ways out in the drive. It was nearly 80 yards or so to the door and It was a bright night and I stopped to admire the stars. Not because I usually do this, but because the stars were SO amazingly bright. You could see the entire galaxy. Billions and billions of stars existing right there and I heard the voice of God say “this… all of this…I made for you” . I was so blown away. I looked around trying to understand what he meant. What I began to understand in that moment was God wanted to dazzle me. To impress me and show off and give me a gift that no one else could be capable of giving. I asked him “God? If I was the only one you had ever created? Would you still have done it?” He laughed and said, “of course….. I love you THAT much”.
He gives in such measures that we could NEVER understand his goodness or his kindness. He stands there wooing us. We don’t understand his love. We are scared to enter in. We can be saved 20 plus years and still not understand his love for us. He gives continuously and we look and say, “it’ll all end” or “why would you choose to love me?” it’s not until we learn to embrace it and enter into his love that we realize…it’ll never end. It will not run dry. We often hold others at arms distance and usually its with good riddance, but God is used to that kind of stand off, and yet he still loves without fail. Without end, we can run to him when we are hurting or when we want to celebrate and he will always be there with outstretched arms waiting for us so he can tell us how much he loves us. I’ve heard God’s love described recently by an author as a scandal. The writer is correct. How many times have I reached out to love and more than one person says, “be careful” “don’t love TOO hard”. People can’t understand God’s love. It IS a scandal. It is too hard for the human mind to comprehend. We aren’t ready for this kind of love. It catches us off guard and it forces us to deal with issues and attitudes so deeply buried within our beings that we can honestly stand and say “that’s not really me”, when in all actuality, Its exactly who we are.
So many of us have been wooed by other people in this life, only to be lied to or hurt, to be let down and disappointed. We are hard wired to disassociate and disengage from the situation and run away. Well that is to say depending on how close we let people in. I have a friend who has tons of friends and this person revels in how great their friends are. I was wondering just how well those hordes of friends actually knew this friend of mine.
You see when we come back to God and we decide to fall in love with him, he will accept partial knowledge of him. Although permits us to keep up our walls, he isn’t about to be satisfied with it. He longs to know us intimately like he knew Adam and Eve in the garden. In Gen.2 Moses tells us of the story of Adam and Eve and tells how well they knew him and how they were naked before him and knew no shame. I think what it meant was they had no shame… shocker huh? There was no guilt, no condemning nothing. They simply knew God loved them, they drew their life from it and it was NOTHING heavy handed. He simply loved them.
When we are on our walk with him and end up in a place where he is talking about his love for us and how he only wants us to be in a place to receive it, it’s pretty okay to accept it and just enjoy him.
Because anything else? Is just heavy handed religion and the spirit of God doesn’t involve itself in it.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Friday, October 8, 2010
Love Love Love Love Love....oh.. and Love...
I know this is a weird question, but have you ever told someone you loved them when they weren't prepared to hear it? Only to have them look at you like you have 3 heads and give you a quick " ummm thank you" or maybe act like they didn't hear you?
I had this happen to me recently. I told this person I loved them and it glanced off of them like a bullet skipping off the confines of a parking lot in a shoot out. I'm awkward in situations like this anyway, you know? like this one time when I was real young, I wanted to kiss a neighbor girl down the road. I went to her door with intentions of kissing her on the cheek and all but she showed up at the door with peanut butter on her face. Not like in the corner of her mouth, but like on her cheek, way up high, like she had been really hungry and was gobbling her pbj like it was her last meal. I just stood and stared at her.. what if she was dying and it WAS her last meal? I couldn't be the last one to kiss a dying girl. I mean I wasn't even that good of a kisser. I had tried practicing with my Farrah Fawcett poster, but it hadn't really worked out that well.
So I told someone I loved them... I felt like an idiot.. I thought about the other things I could have said to keep the relationship in right form but I had to go and reveal my feelings.. you know "show my hand?" and make it all wrong and yucky... I have a friend named Kim who told me several times "Never show your hand". She was referring to my feelings in a relationship and told me it was bad for others to know your intentions. I didn’t' really like her advice. Not because it wasn’t' good advice, but to me when you don't give someone your intentions, it's a lot like allowing them to think you have no feelings for them. That whole stupid "Well if I didn't like you, I wouldn't talk to you" or "you know I care about you... I shouldn't have to tell you" thing people lay on you when they don't have the ability to speak their emotional feelings.
Interestingly I was dwelling on this again today, probably because I felt so bad, but really because there was something else I wanted to know in this incident. I just couldn't stop thinking how I had really messed up and how stupid I sounded because God knows if you keep your emotions pent up, then we never really suffer the embarrassment of it all, and in mid thought I was hit with a huge AHA moment. God spoke right in the midst of the whole thought process and I heard him loud and clear. I don't mean I had a bright idea and gave God the credit.. I mean I heard him speak boldly... "if I have been trying to get people to just receive my love for thousands of years and not having 100% luck at it, what makes you think you can do a lot better?" It hit me like a ton of bricks. God loves people everyday with a purer love than I could ever hope to imagine and people keep him at arms length daily, and if the God who created the heavens and earth is struggling? then what worry should I have?
The other AHA moment I had was when I realized that loving people isn't the wrong place for me to live in. If I intend to love someone, why would I be wrong for pouring out my heart to that person? If you look at Gen 3:7 it talks of Eve and Adam together eating the forbidden fruit and having their eyes opened… they immediately realized…they were naked. It can be interpreted many ways, either mentally naked, socially naked or physically without clothes.. I take it to mean they were without covering. God was their covering, God was the blanket that kept them completely without fear, without stress, without need, and when they separated themselves from that covering? They became fearful and needy and stressed and needing that relationship back. God walked with them in the cool of the day and talked to them as if they were his only friends and they had NO concerns, until they entered into the separation of sin.
Now mind you I am NOT a big sin guy. I don’t mean I never sin, I mean it’s not the axe I grind to call forth repentance and I don’t harp on it. I preach love and the fear of wrecking that relationship with God and the abstinence of sin to keep from doing so.
But here stands a man and woman who through no fault of anyone else have become separated. They don’t have that daily covering and affirmation any longer. Therefore God comes and tries to love them, but because of the rift they have caused? They are no longer able to feel it. So sin entered the world and people began to fill the void of pain with anything but God. God only wanted to be the answer and for them to enjoy the walk in the cool of the garden daily.
If the God of all the heavens can’t pour out the purest form of love and have people receive it without suspicion? Why should we fret if we can’t either?
The key? I think is to love people where they are with no guilt of their frustrations. Don’t carry the burden of those people when you do… simply love them till they know they are loved. Bring nothing condemning against them, only love… and tell someone you love them today ; )
I had this happen to me recently. I told this person I loved them and it glanced off of them like a bullet skipping off the confines of a parking lot in a shoot out. I'm awkward in situations like this anyway, you know? like this one time when I was real young, I wanted to kiss a neighbor girl down the road. I went to her door with intentions of kissing her on the cheek and all but she showed up at the door with peanut butter on her face. Not like in the corner of her mouth, but like on her cheek, way up high, like she had been really hungry and was gobbling her pbj like it was her last meal. I just stood and stared at her.. what if she was dying and it WAS her last meal? I couldn't be the last one to kiss a dying girl. I mean I wasn't even that good of a kisser. I had tried practicing with my Farrah Fawcett poster, but it hadn't really worked out that well.
So I told someone I loved them... I felt like an idiot.. I thought about the other things I could have said to keep the relationship in right form but I had to go and reveal my feelings.. you know "show my hand?" and make it all wrong and yucky... I have a friend named Kim who told me several times "Never show your hand". She was referring to my feelings in a relationship and told me it was bad for others to know your intentions. I didn’t' really like her advice. Not because it wasn’t' good advice, but to me when you don't give someone your intentions, it's a lot like allowing them to think you have no feelings for them. That whole stupid "Well if I didn't like you, I wouldn't talk to you" or "you know I care about you... I shouldn't have to tell you" thing people lay on you when they don't have the ability to speak their emotional feelings.
Interestingly I was dwelling on this again today, probably because I felt so bad, but really because there was something else I wanted to know in this incident. I just couldn't stop thinking how I had really messed up and how stupid I sounded because God knows if you keep your emotions pent up, then we never really suffer the embarrassment of it all, and in mid thought I was hit with a huge AHA moment. God spoke right in the midst of the whole thought process and I heard him loud and clear. I don't mean I had a bright idea and gave God the credit.. I mean I heard him speak boldly... "if I have been trying to get people to just receive my love for thousands of years and not having 100% luck at it, what makes you think you can do a lot better?" It hit me like a ton of bricks. God loves people everyday with a purer love than I could ever hope to imagine and people keep him at arms length daily, and if the God who created the heavens and earth is struggling? then what worry should I have?
The other AHA moment I had was when I realized that loving people isn't the wrong place for me to live in. If I intend to love someone, why would I be wrong for pouring out my heart to that person? If you look at Gen 3:7 it talks of Eve and Adam together eating the forbidden fruit and having their eyes opened… they immediately realized…they were naked. It can be interpreted many ways, either mentally naked, socially naked or physically without clothes.. I take it to mean they were without covering. God was their covering, God was the blanket that kept them completely without fear, without stress, without need, and when they separated themselves from that covering? They became fearful and needy and stressed and needing that relationship back. God walked with them in the cool of the day and talked to them as if they were his only friends and they had NO concerns, until they entered into the separation of sin.
Now mind you I am NOT a big sin guy. I don’t mean I never sin, I mean it’s not the axe I grind to call forth repentance and I don’t harp on it. I preach love and the fear of wrecking that relationship with God and the abstinence of sin to keep from doing so.
But here stands a man and woman who through no fault of anyone else have become separated. They don’t have that daily covering and affirmation any longer. Therefore God comes and tries to love them, but because of the rift they have caused? They are no longer able to feel it. So sin entered the world and people began to fill the void of pain with anything but God. God only wanted to be the answer and for them to enjoy the walk in the cool of the garden daily.
If the God of all the heavens can’t pour out the purest form of love and have people receive it without suspicion? Why should we fret if we can’t either?
The key? I think is to love people where they are with no guilt of their frustrations. Don’t carry the burden of those people when you do… simply love them till they know they are loved. Bring nothing condemning against them, only love… and tell someone you love them today ; )
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