I grew up in a home where I had to walk on eggshells. Whether I was viewed as the golden child or the scapegoat depended on the parent, and whether they were happy to see me relied on a host of things outside my control. Growing up in that environment, I learned love was unreliable.
Love was “sus,” as my daughters would say. “Love” was manipulative, transactional, and inconsistent. There were high highs and low lows. There were moments when my parents remembered they’d wanted to be godly Christian parents. But, despite the occasional apology, things always went back to the factory defaults. I learned I was better off being invisible and meeting my own needs.
Other hurts continued to teach me that love was unreliable — friendships ending, breakups, a divorce. Love was an emotional graveyard filled with the bones of old relationships, mislaid expectations, and broken vows. I found a way to deal with all this disappointment. I dulled my expectations, assumed the worst, and secretly tested my relational buckets for holes.
Maybe you have an emotional graveyard too. We are all born with such a deep longing for something more. We search for this subconscious longing in our parents, friends, and spouses. Even if you aren’t in counseling sorting out your childhood or have a reliable childhood best friend or a spouse who’s everything you’d hoped for… It still falls short of this longing to be loved in the way Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13: 1-13.
I knew from Bible school about the three different words for love. phileo —brotherly love, eros —erotic love, and the word AGAPE. I knew they meant other things, but I didn’t know how the Greeks understood the word Agape. The term has a closer tie to gravity than it does to emotion.
The familiar noun αγαπη (agape) is commonly translated with “love” but it’s not that simple, or perhaps simpler than that. Agape does not describe a feeling, and certainly not a mushy feeling. Instead it describes a natural force that is felt in some way or form by every entity in the universe from atoms up to entire societies.
Abarim-Publications’ Online Biblical Greek Dictionary: https://www.abarim-publications.com/DictionaryG/a/a-g-a-p-et.html
God doesn’t “burn” for us. God isn’t our best friend. God’s love for us is like our sympathetic nervous system. God can’t stop loving us the same way we can’t stop breathing.
God’s love is as constant as the tides and not because God FEELS that way. God’s love is like a gravitational pull; it is water trickling downstream; it is the earth spinning; it’s grass growing in the spring; it’s a love letter all around us.
Love is all around us. It is in the rhythms of nature. Sometimes there is a constancy in humanity, but I believe that kind of love comes with wisdom. And wisdom takes a lifetime to develop.
Have you ever wondered why you feel the pull to get away? Do you need trees and bodies of water and mountains and sky? I would posit this: nature reminds us in a deeply rooted way of God’s love for us.
Agape isn’t a feeling; it’s a force of nature. God could no more stop loving you than He could betray the laws of the universe.
As a little girl hiding in the shadows wondering which version of her parents would show up– I needed this deeper understanding of love. Because God isn’t a reckless parent, God isn’t even a “good earthly parent” — I believe that concept falls short too. God is solid, trustworthy, and loves you because it’s WHO HE IS. God could no more stop loving you than the moon could resist its steady pull on the ocean.
Take some time today outside and reflect on what you see. It’s God’s constancy, His love for you, written all over this earth.
Here is the first section of my 1 Corinthians 13 rewrite:
If I write poems and tell stories with the sharp tongue of the Bard or the persuasiveness of Barak Obama but have not love — I am nothing but the endless whipping of wind.
If I share the Gospel message with force, telling of His mysteries and making it as simple as an abacus, and if my faith says to a heart, “beat,” and it pumps, but I do not love, I am as empty as a tomb.
If I give everything to the best charity organization I can find and offer my life for another in God’s name but act without love, my sacrifice will have no meaning. My words, faith, and actions mean nothing; I am utterly empty without love.
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