reflections on love...

Love. One little word that is infused with so much meaning these days. This semester, Tom (the ruf campus minister) is preaching on relationships in large group. Which is great because, as he said in the first meeting, "it's what you all are talking about all the time anyway."

So, I've been thinking about love and relationships and how broken they tend to be. Not just romantic ones, but all relationships. We are all hiding and lying to each other, afraid to admit that everything we fear might be true about ourselves actually is quite true. And I'm not standing on the outside with the answers. I'm sitting in the mess, thinking about the way I do not love people like Jesus loves me. So, I'm thinking about how we humans love and how Jesus loves and wishing that in my heart there was a smaller gap between what I say I believe and how that actually plays out in my life.

We love options. If you don't believe me, go to the grocery store. There are at least three different brands of everything. What are your priorities? Quality, price, brand? The world is one big grocery store. Wander down the aisles and select friends, homes, tv shows, activities. We pile it into our shopping cart but always save the receipts. We always want to be able to return things. There's something unsettling about finality. Just create a facebook event. I guarantee you that you will have a hard time getting people to R.S.V.P. "yes." You'll have a million "maybes." Why? Because something better might come along at the last minute. Commitment might get in the way of a better option, a more exciting, fulfilling, enticing possibility. That's freedom, we think. The ability to change our mind, try something new, never be locked into one thing.

But there's a dark side to this type of "freedom." An unsettling, unspoken reality that cannot be denied. If everything and everyone is indespensible and revocable, then you are always at risk for being tossed aside. You are someone else's option. Thus, people are just one more item on the grocery shelf of life. And, as individuals, we become living, breathing advertisements for ourselves, accentuating our "good" characteristics and concealing our flaws, giving people what they want, fearing exposure.

But Christ's perfect love casts out fear. Christ's committed, unfailing love isn't based on our ability to perform. It's seems easier to grasp that concept in regard to salvation but to actually accept that it's true every single day is harder. The King of heaven smiles upon His children every moment of every day because of Jesus. The striving, commitment-fearing cynic in me is drinking of this truth right now and reveling in the promise that even now Christ is redeeming broken relationships and that He frees us to enter relationships without pretending. And though it feels like this is so far from reality, someone reminded me recently that we cannot help becoming more like Jesus. He is at work.