True Love

I entertained the pictures of red and pink Valentine hearts swirling and falling and dancing everywhere around me. Every time I turn my thoughts to the Lord lately I feel him pressing the urgency of knowing – and flowing in – His love. So, this shower of “love” seemed a welcome and expected vision of Jesus’ love for me. It wasn’t romantic, but it was … “sweet”. Sugary sweet.

Ugh. Suddenly I knew this was just my mind creating in pictures what is commonly associated with love.

The picture morphed to a Jesus-looking man down on one knee before me, crying and pleading for my returned affection – after all, he had given so much and longed for my response. I surveyed the scene for but a moment and cast it away, for it as well was no more than a failed attempt of my soul to define love.

Then I pictured a man in a dirty white robe carrying a cross up a hill. The reality that scene represents is surely the most profound act of love ever to exist on earth, but even this came from the woeful inadequacy of my imagination.

“Then what is true love?” I whispered in frustration to the dark. As I strained to see the definition that escaped my expectations, an unsettling feeling came over me – an emotion so foreign I could grasp neither words nor mental image of it for more than a second. It was such a continuous flow of pure, unselfish action that my mind had nowhere to file it. It was a pouring out of selfless service with no expectation of reciprocation. It flowed from a heart capable of receiving love and service in return, but IN-capable of either demanding it or pleading for it. My words are empty in describing its other-centered purity.

I wept with incapacity to hold what I was trying to behold. How many times have I prayed, “Pour out your love to me. Make me love like You!” Yet, THIS Love! - I was not sure I wanted this Love! This Love would annihilate my ambition and demolish my flesh. It would blow up my ideas of sweet, self-righteous servanthood while it bulldozed my expectations of even getting appreciated. This Love WOULD carry a cross up a hill, while telling those it saved, “Don’t even weep for Me.” It would give everything and demand nothing. THIS Love was scary. I’d never experienced anything like it and knew it exists nowhere within my natural character. It is so big, I could not hold it for more than a mere moment and continue to fail to understand it.

Is this really the Love with which He loves me?

What if I let that realization sink into me?

What if I somehow allowed even a drop of it to flow from me to others?

What if this is the Love with which He intends for us to love God and love our neighbor...

What if we don’t . . . can’t . . . and He continues to love us anyway? Not because he has obligated himself, but because True Love is incapable of anything less?

What if the Love of God really is “shed abroad in our hearts THROUGH THE HOLY GHOST” ? For that is the miracle it would take to receive it. (Rom 5:5)