Love Idealized

Finally, this:

“You think it’s just a small thing, don’t you,  to try out another sin-project when the first one fails? But Egypt will leave you in the lurch  the same way that Assyria did. You’re going to walk away from there  wringing your hands. I, God, have blacklisted those you trusted. You’ll get not a lick of help from them.”

~ Jeremiah 2:36-37 The Message

Confusion.  The Israelites are desperately in search of a life of safety and significance;  they keep chasing after different dreams hoping to find the magic combination of love connection and purposeful living that brings them what they long for - wow, can you relate?  I can.

When my mentors talked on and on about the most important thing I needed to know they spoke about what I needed to do:  love well. I found this a hard pill to swallow. Today, I understand that in large part it seemed like a message without hope.  I didn’t know how to love well and found few models for it when I looked around at the people I knew - and I knew some pretty awesome people.  My confusion came in the form of black and white thinking. I thought that loving well meant loving perfectly - no selfishness, no conflict, no problems in relationships.

This is not what loving well means.  Loving well is more related to loving wholeheartedly - it begins and ends with our love for God and is revealed in our capacity to give and receive love for ourselves and to others.  

It isn’t about harmony - this kind of love is a battle cry!  It’s isn’t about not making mistakes or ever having a relational snafu - it is about caring enough to figure out how to navigate and stay the course. Love God. Respect self. Let others love us.  Learn how to love others.

How do you think you have confused love’s meaning in your own relationships?

Delusion

Jeremiah continues to systematically lay out God’s charges against his people, including:  

“What a generation you turned out to be! Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I warn you? Have I let you down, Israel? Am I nothing but a dead-end street? Why do my people say, ‘Good riddance! From now on we’re on our own’? Young women don’t forget their jewelry, do they? Brides don’t show up without their veils, do they? But my people forget me. Day after day after day they never give me a thought. What an impressive start you made to get the most out of life. You founded schools of sin, taught graduate courses in evil! And now you’re sending out graduates, resplendent in cap and gown—except the gowns are stained with the blood of your victims! All that blood convicts you. You cut and hurt a lot of people to get where you are. And yet you have the gall to say, ‘I’ve done nothing wrong. God doesn’t mind. He hasn’t punished me, has he?’ Don’t look now, but judgment’s on the way, aimed at you who say, ‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’  

~ Jeremiah 2: 31-35 The Message

I have done nothing wrong.

Although a few people struggle with feeling as if everything is their fault, many of us have the opposite issue.  We cannot seem to figure out what we’ve done wrong in a given situation. It’s awfully hard to give and receive love all willy nilly if we cannot see the ways that we either make it difficult for folks to love us or we find it difficult to love others.

The truth is, there are many things that we do and say and think and feel - all in the name of love - that is not love.

In what ways do you find it difficult to admit that what you have done wrong?

Bringing Charges

Through Jeremiah God explains to his people how their relationship got into such a mess that even his patience has run its course:

       —God’s Decree—  “charging you and your children and your grandchildren. Look around. Have you ever seen anything quite like this? Sail to the western islands and look. Travel to the Kedar wilderness and look. Look closely. Has this ever happened before, that a nation has traded in its gods for gods that aren’t even close to gods? But my people have traded my Glory for empty god-dreams and silly god-schemes.  

`“Stand in shock, heavens, at what you see! Throw up your hands in disbelief—this can’t be!” God’s Decree. “My people have committed a compound sin:  they’ve walked out on me, the fountain of fresh flowing waters, and then dug cisterns—cisterns that leak, cisterns that are no better than sieves.”

~Jeremiah 2: 11-13 The Message

My son who studies such things explained to me recently that, historically, people who worshipped many gods didn’t throw one away and replace them with a better god, they added to their deity collection.  In this passage God is saying to his people, in essence, you have respected me less than the tribes around you who worship idols. You traded me in. To make matters worse God says that his people have adopted false strategies by putting their hope in other countries, leaders and material possessions to keep them safe.  I believe that our conscious contact with God through the practice of spiritual disciplines provides us with wisdom, insight and healing that cannot be found anywhere else. But we, like the Israelites of old, keep looking in all the wrong places to find our sense of well-being and our wholeness.

What about you?  What have you pursued in the hope that it would make you whole and well?  There are many tools and treatments and such that help us recover our lives, but to reject hope in a power greater than ourselves and try to handle life on our own, independent of spiritual pursuits, may fall under the category of false strategy.

Love in Context

The bible provides us stories of God calling his people to do extraordinary things.  Who doesn’t want to be extraordinary? I do! I want to be courageous and a full on follower of God.  Because these stories (which we emphasize and challenge ourselves to live up to) feed our own egos and desires for significance, I think it has caused us to miss the obvious.

It is true that some people are called to do extraordinary things as an expression of their faith.  But those are actually the exceptions. Mostly, I believe, we are provided a vision for living an ordinary day-to-day life with extraordinary vision for its sacredness. The longest book in the bible is the book of Jeremiah.  In it we find an unflinching portrayal of a people who have forgotten who they are because they have lost touch with what they once knew of God and his relationship to them. This is our eternal dilemma it appears. Maintaining conscious contact with God and his inspired way of seeing is for whatever reason, I do not know it, a constant challenge.  

Jeremiah is tasked with trying to wake up his sleepy tribe and help them remember in a vain attempt to avoid the 70 year banishment.  He’s a gloomy guy and not very popular (the truth rarely is well-received). But he combines his doom and gloom prophesy with the promise of restoration - if his people would just wake up and return to God.  There are three things that plagued the Israelites and I suspect continue to plague us - all of which distort our capacity to give and receive love:

1. False strategies for abundant living

2. Self-deception

3. Straight up confusion

I hope to break these down and explain them further in the next blog post but just to be clear - these three problems impact our capacity to give and receive love.  And love, in the kingdom of God is a big freaking deal.

Today, take some time to assess your own love potential and practices.  Do you ever get confused about how to express love in a challenging relationship?

Love Misunderstood

11-15 “I’ve told you these things for a purpose: that my joy might be your joy, and your joy wholly mature. This is my command: Love one another the way I loved you. This is the very best way to love. Put your life on the line for your friends. You are my friends when you do the things I command you. I’m no longer calling you servants because servants don’t understand what their master is thinking and planning. No, I’ve named you friends because I’ve let you in on everything I’ve heard from the Father.

~ John 15:11-15 The Message

If I have a very fuzzy idea about how God loves, it makes sense that I would have trouble figuring out how to love the way he loves me.  I had no frame of reference for a gentle, unconditional, joyful loving relationship. My relationships mostly seemed conditional, hinging on my capacity to please the person whose love I desperately desired.  I often felt like there was some love system that I was trying to game in order to trick someone into caring about me.

When I read the Old Testament I was confused by this God who scorched cities wiping dens of inequity.  Don’t misunderstand, these folks seemed to deserve what they got - but where did that leave me on the spectrum of God smiting?  God gave David power to slay Goliath but couldn’t seem to keep David from committing adultery and shockingly killing his faithful servant Uriah (his paramour’s husband) to hide his affair.  God kicked Adam and Eve out of the garden (I failed to notice that he went with them). Joseph, a godly guy if a bit naive when he tells his brothers that he learned in a dream that he would one day rule them seems to suffer all sorts of unfair treatment.  Is this how God loves? Does God really protect his beloved? Or are we all unworthy of being loved unless someone does something radical - like maybe dying on a cross - to save our sorry asses? Are we really so intrinsically broken? Are we all bad to the bone?  I only had to read the book of Job to fuel my doubts about whether even God could love me without me ending up battered and bruised. After all, look what happened to Job, a righteous man. Even he got kicked in the gut. And I was no Job.

There was this sentence in John, I learned it in the King James translation, “Greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friends.”  Ok, so I am supposed to love large, I thought. I am supposed to be willing to die for my friends.

This put me in codependent territory - a land where we pay more attention to the needs of others than we do to our own needs.  This intuitively felt “off” to me. I struggled with the concept. It turns out this struggle was valuable.

Do you ever feel confused by God’s love commands?  What trips you up?

To be continued…