Pondering love...

What is your reaction to something not going your way?

I have taken every personality test in the book. I am a choleric melancholy. I am a high D per DISC. I am an 8 on the enneagram. Meyers-Briggs called me ESTJ in my youth but as I’ve matured, I have morphed into ENFP. This information should be an indicator to anyone that has the information, how I might react in any given situation.

I am a firm believer that God does not make mistakes. He is I AM, and He remains the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. The Bible confirms this in Hebrews 13:8: Jesus, the Anointed One, is always the same—yesterday, today, and forever. Time and again, I return to Isaiah 55:8-9: My intentions are not always yours, and I do not go about things as you do. My thoughts and My ways are above and beyond you just as heaven is far from your reach here on earth. I return because I rarely understand what the holy heck He is doing. I do not understand why He is doing it or when He is doing it and being who He created me to be … I like empirical evidence. My life would be so much easier if He said, “Tiffany go this way because XYZ” but that is not faith.

He longs to stretch us. Remold us. Morph us from the mess we’ve created for ourselves into the perfected person that was His initial and very intentional creation. Jeremiah 1:5a states: Before I even formed you in your mother’s womb, I knew all about you. Before you drew your first breath, I had already chosen you. Isaiah 49:15 reminds us that He never forgets us: Is it possible for a mother, however disappointed, however hurt, to forget her nursing child? Can she feel nothing for the baby she carried and birthed? Even if she could, I, God, will never forget you.

He calls us to love…Those who are loved by God, let His love continually pour from you to one another, because God is love. Everyone who loves is fathered by God and experiences an intimate knowledge of Him. The one who doesn’t love has yet to know God, for God is love. The light of God’s love shined within us when He sent his matchless Son into the world so that we might live through Him. This is love: He loved us long before we loved Him. It was His love, not ours. He proved it by sending his Son to be the pleasing sacrificial offering to take away our sins. Delightfully loved ones, if He loved us with such tremendous love, then “loving one another” should be our way of life! No one has ever gazed upon the fullness of God’s splendor. But if we love one another, God makes His permanent home in us, and we make our permanent home in Him, and His love is brought to its full expression in us. And He has given us His Spirit within us so that we can have the assurance that He lives in us and that we live in Him (1 John 4:7-13).

Those words say to me that I am to love you and that love is the evidence in me that I love Him and by doing so, it ushers the very presence of God into me, personally, by way of the Holy Spirit.

What happens when my human heart encounters a person who will not love me back? Honestly, it depends on the person and what I perceive as our level of intimacy. I have found that in my day to day life, I can love just about anyone for a short period of time. I can love wholeheartedly that woman cashing out my groceries for the ten minutes I am in line or the server at the restaurant, I am only spending at most maybe a couple of hours with but the person I have allowed in deeper, the person I thought might be a friend or an ally…well, now the act of love becomes a whole lot less about them and more about me. I have had to ask myself earnestly how much of Him do I want in me because the more I have of Him the more of me I must crucify in order to love more deeply and correctly.

We often read and should quite honestly commit to memory, 1 Corinthians 13:4-10:

Love is large and incredibly patient. Love is gentle and consistently kind to all. It refuses to be jealous when blessing comes to someone else. Love does not brag about one’s achievements nor inflate its own importance. Love does not traffic in shame and disrespect, nor selfishly seek its own honor. Love is not easily irritated or quick to take offense. Love joyfully celebrates honesty and finds no delight in what is wrong. Love is a safe place of shelter, for it never stops believing the best for others. Love never takes failure as defeat, for it never gives up. Love never stops loving. It extends beyond the gift of prophecy, which eventually fades away. It is more enduring than tongues, which will one day fall silent. Love remains long after words of knowledge are forgotten. Our present knowledge and our prophecies are but partial, but when love’s perfection arrives, the partial will fade away.

BUT what about verses 1-3 which say: If I were to speak with eloquence in earth’s many languages, and in the heavenly tongues of angels, yet I didn’t express myself with love, my words would be reduced to the hollow sound of nothing more than a clanging cymbal.  And if I were to have the gift of prophecy with a profound understanding of God’s hidden secrets, and if I possessed unending supernatural knowledge, and if I had the greatest gift of faith that could move mountains, but have never learned to love, then I am nothing. And if I were to be so generous as to give away everything, I owned to feed the poor, and to offer my body to be burned as a martyr, without the pure motive of love, I would gain nothing of value.

These verses hold the practical consequences of what life without love looks like. If your words are astute but contain no love, then they sound like bullshit. If you know everything, even things hidden to the rest of us and have faith enough to produce miracles, but no love then you are literally nothing. If you gave away everything you possess to those in need and died in sacrifice for your belief in God but did so without love, you did it all for nothing…you lost everything and gained nothing. Brings to mind Matthew 7:21: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter into the realm of heaven’s kingdom. It is only those who persist in doing the will of my heavenly Father.”

God’s will ALWAYS includes love because HE IS LOVE.

When I am hurt by someone unexpected, someone close; my personality and instincts take over and I push away, build a wall, isolate but God will only allow me to remain there for so long because His expectation is that I continue to become more like Him which means, I have to not be irritated or take offense or take failure as defeat (mine or yours) or take delight in what is wrong or give up. No, instead His expectation for me is that I never stop loving.

Now Paul’s words have a potent value: I have been crucified with the Anointed One—I am no longer alive—but the Anointed is living in me; and whatever life I have left in this failing body I live by the faithfulness of God’s Son, the One who loves me and gave His body on the cross for me (Galatians 2:20). Every time, love brings me back to the cross. It is the ultimate mark of love. Love will, at some point, hurt you: emotionally, maybe physically, spiritually too perhaps but the sacrifices we make for love are also what slays our fleshly, human selves and allows the transformation into our God perfected, heavenly selves.

Love is a choice…as John Mayer sings: Love is a verb. It ain’t a thing. It’s not something you own. Its not something you scream. When you show me love, I don’t need your words. Yeah, love ain’t a thing. Love is a verb. So you gotta show, show, show me that love is verb. You can say I love you all day long but if you never act upon that love with action, chances are the recipient will never believe you. Jesus’s love was in action. He should us first. Now, we need to show ours.

Lord, I pray that in me, Your love will be a verb, in action and that those you call me to love will never doubt Your love for them because of something I do wrong but rathe ALWAYS KNOW Your love for them because of something I do right. Thank you for your patience with me. In the name of Jesus, AMEN.