The following is a paraphrased excerpt from "Soul Cravings" by Erwin McManus. This one is a little long!The best that I can tell, no matter how power full it feels, the staying power of love isn't that high a percentage.
The intensity of love seems to have no bearing on its resilience. If anything, the more you love someone, the more capacity you have to hate him or her. And why, by the way, does it seem like half the time you didn't even know you were in love till you lost it? Is heartbreak the only way to know it's the real deal? After all, the only people who can hurt you deeply are the ones you allow to get deep inside your soul. This is what makes love so dangerous. The more that you love someone, the more a person can hurt you. When you give your heart away to someone, you entrust it to that persons care. Your beloved can pretty much do whatever him or her wants with it. You are vulnerable and defenseless. Isn't love grand? No wonder we are all searching for it.
No, lets rethink that.
Given all the problems love can create, why do we keep longing for it? How many thousands of years will it take for us to learn? How many Romeos and Juliet's need to lie dead on the floor before we are willing to give up this addiction? I know that Romeo and Juliet are not real, but is love? If evolution is our preferred understanding of the human story, why can we not evolve ourselves out of this primal Achilles' heel we know and love?And don't give me this thing about the propagation of the species. Love isn't necessary for reproduction - just sex is. All you need is attraction, not emotion... If intimacy is only about attraction, we could just keep lust and dispense of love.
How in this post-information age, in the era of the technological revolution, we still need something as primitive as love? No matter how many time we fail at love or how many times love fails us, we plow ahead. Even the scars of love rarely stop us from risking at love.
Strange as it seems, in the midst of our most painful memories, we find our most treasured ones. If you had the chance to erase all the memories of your greatest love to free of the pain of losing it, would you? I wouldn't. I don't think that many of us would.
We are addicted to love, and it's our of control. We would give anything and everything to find it. Here is where is start to draw a theory. There is more going on here than meets the eye. It's as if we have been purposefully designed with at factory defect that keeps us searching for love. It seems humiliating to say it, but we need to be loved. I need to be loved. If you try to ignore it, if you think that you can live your life without love, you are in the worst shape the the person who's desperate to find it. "To give up on love is to choose a life that is less human. To give up on love is to give up on life."
When you give up on love, everything else seems to go with it- joy, hope, forgiveness, compassion, they are all connected. But you might wonder to yourself; What if I never find love? After all, you can't be held responsible if you never searched for love, risked in love, even fought for love, and yet have always found it unrequited. When love does not come to you, it breaks you heart. One thing stranger than our need to be loved is our need to love, which leads me to ask "Are we designed for love?"
There was a monologue from the movie "Thin Red Line" that talked about the nature of love.
"My dear wife, you get something twisted out of your insides by all this blood, filth and noise. I wanna stay changeless for you. I wanna come back to you the man I was before. How do we get to the other shores? To those blue hills? Love. Where does it come from? Who lit this flame in us? No war can put it out, conquer it. I was a prisoner. You set me free." What is this love? Where does it come from? Why are we so affected by is presence and its absence?
We can not live unaffected by love. We are most alive when we find it, most devastated when we lose it, most empty when we give up on it, most inhumane when we betray it, and most passionate when we pursue it. The human story seems more driven by the insanity of love than the survival of the fittest.
Can you be honest enough to admit how love pulls you, woos you, eludes you, torments you - sometimes all in the same day? You were created for relationship. This is and always be the core of your being. All of us have a need to belong, and all of us are on a search for intimacy. No matter how many things about us are different, in this we are all the same - we crave love. It is as if we are all searching for a love we have lost. Or perhaps more strangely we are searching for a love we have never known but somehow sense is awaiting us.
The most powerful evidence that our souls crave God is that within us is a longing for love. We are all connected by a thin red line.
No, lets rethink that.
Given all the problems love can create, why do we keep longing for it? How many thousands of years will it take for us to learn? How many Romeos and Juliet's need to lie dead on the floor before we are willing to give up this addiction? I know that Romeo and Juliet are not real, but is love? If evolution is our preferred understanding of the human story, why can we not evolve ourselves out of this primal Achilles' heel we know and love?And don't give me this thing about the propagation of the species. Love isn't necessary for reproduction - just sex is. All you need is attraction, not emotion... If intimacy is only about attraction, we could just keep lust and dispense of love.
How in this post-information age, in the era of the technological revolution, we still need something as primitive as love? No matter how many time we fail at love or how many times love fails us, we plow ahead. Even the scars of love rarely stop us from risking at love.
Strange as it seems, in the midst of our most painful memories, we find our most treasured ones. If you had the chance to erase all the memories of your greatest love to free of the pain of losing it, would you? I wouldn't. I don't think that many of us would.
We are addicted to love, and it's our of control. We would give anything and everything to find it. Here is where is start to draw a theory. There is more going on here than meets the eye. It's as if we have been purposefully designed with at factory defect that keeps us searching for love. It seems humiliating to say it, but we need to be loved. I need to be loved. If you try to ignore it, if you think that you can live your life without love, you are in the worst shape the the person who's desperate to find it. "To give up on love is to choose a life that is less human. To give up on love is to give up on life."
When you give up on love, everything else seems to go with it- joy, hope, forgiveness, compassion, they are all connected. But you might wonder to yourself; What if I never find love? After all, you can't be held responsible if you never searched for love, risked in love, even fought for love, and yet have always found it unrequited. When love does not come to you, it breaks you heart. One thing stranger than our need to be loved is our need to love, which leads me to ask "Are we designed for love?"
There was a monologue from the movie "Thin Red Line" that talked about the nature of love.
"My dear wife, you get something twisted out of your insides by all this blood, filth and noise. I wanna stay changeless for you. I wanna come back to you the man I was before. How do we get to the other shores? To those blue hills? Love. Where does it come from? Who lit this flame in us? No war can put it out, conquer it. I was a prisoner. You set me free." What is this love? Where does it come from? Why are we so affected by is presence and its absence?
We can not live unaffected by love. We are most alive when we find it, most devastated when we lose it, most empty when we give up on it, most inhumane when we betray it, and most passionate when we pursue it. The human story seems more driven by the insanity of love than the survival of the fittest.
Can you be honest enough to admit how love pulls you, woos you, eludes you, torments you - sometimes all in the same day? You were created for relationship. This is and always be the core of your being. All of us have a need to belong, and all of us are on a search for intimacy. No matter how many things about us are different, in this we are all the same - we crave love. It is as if we are all searching for a love we have lost. Or perhaps more strangely we are searching for a love we have never known but somehow sense is awaiting us.
The most powerful evidence that our souls crave God is that within us is a longing for love. We are all connected by a thin red line.
2 comments:
And yet we as humans have the most difficult time discerning what is and is not love. We often attempt to fill that longing with what we think is love only to reveal itself as an empty passion.
The love I have for my spouse is a love - it’s not always perfect.
The love I have for my children is a love - it’s not always perfect.
True love does exist. God IS Love.
The more I learn of love from His perspective and the more I practice the love Christ showed to all creation, the closer I will be to knowing true love and having true love to give.
Thank you, Jon for the good word. God is love. His love is perfect, ours is not, but our deepest desire is to love as perfectly as He does. We mess up so terribly, but it is beautiful and comforting to know that He will always love us, and He is the creator of our need for love.
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