Love, as we try to describe it, is a mixture of visual, chemical and emotional states that absolutely wrecks our minds and makes us do activities out of our realm of normalcy. The moment when Cupid's arrow strikes, all things change. A person in love will go to great lengths to ensure that love stays and never goes away. It's a feeling so tremendous that often times people seek that emotion, run after it at all costs, instead of settling into a relationship.
The reason men and women wake up one day and say, I want a divorce is because they crave that feeling, that insatiable overwhelming emotion of love. They want to feel it towards someone else and they want to feel it from someone else.
It's their identity in the relationship. If the feeling is there, then everything is good but if it's not then things are bad. We as a people, all need a specific type of love and it's not the emotion that we should be after. Security in someone, knowing that they will be there through the worst and through the best is more valuable than emotion and as we mature, the craving for pure emotional love should wane and a more mature approach to love should take over. Yet, that feeling of overwhelming, heart rattling, stomach churning love, that is nothing more than pure ecstasy, haunts our minds and makes us yearn for that moment over and over. For some, the pursuit of this type of love leads them to many relationships and many heartbreaks as this emotion doesn't last forever.
I have read many passages where God asks Israel to return to the love of their youth. As we have already discussed above, the love of our youth is very powerful. God draws us into Him through the Holy Spirit and Jesus and there is that one moment, that existential moment, where we are drawn to Him through that same euphoric love we can have with each other. He draws us with the feelings of happiness, lightheartedness and pure weightlessness as He takes away our burdens and heavy hearts. The first encounter with Him makes you shudder in realization of your wretchedness and the possibilities of cleanliness all at the same moment. His love overwhelms us and destroys all our walls and barriers. Our defenses fail and we submit, falling exhausted into His arms. The battle of our hearts is won and that feeling, the same feeling we see in each other at the moment of realized love, washes over us and takes control.
We pursue because of it. We sacrifice for it. We never want to let it go. For a person on a rollercoaster, the climatic hill, the slow rise to the top and then the sudden plunge to the bottom, is the only thing I can compare the pursuit of love to. We are drawn in and then plunged head first and the feeling of complete terror added with trepidation, evolves into excitement as the ride continues on. It's why we get off the ride and jump into the line again. When God's love drops us down a 200 ft. drop and our stomachs rise out of our mouths, we often only want that experience over and over. Just knowing He loves us and settling into a relationship with Him isn't enough. We want that sense of youthful love over and over which leads us down paths not intended for us to pursue. The idols Israel pursued drew them out of God by the same way. Lust for that feeling of importance drew them away. In God, once that overwhelming honeymoon phase fades, we are left with the work to pursue Him instead of being pursued by Him.
We cannot expect the continued aphrodisiacal effects of young love to continue throughout our entire relationship with our spouses or with Him. Maturity must be reached in order for it to obtain a sustainable goal. In other words, the pursuit of the feelings of love must evolve into a mutual understanding of love. We must know we are loved without being lavished with gifts and pleasures.
I'm beating around the bush a bit but our whole goal in any relationship is to go from that passionate love to a more mature love. God will pursue us in the beginning and lavish us with spiritual glee, gifts and understandings. He will cover us from head to toe in goose bumps just to tell us He's near. He'll give us spiritual gifts and He'll give us great understandings into His written word along with His voice. All these things are designed to draw us into Him. When His pursuit ends and our end of the relationship begins, which is time with Him, we tend to spiral into a people only seeking that feeling of love.
The feelings of love fade and as it does, should be replaced with knowing we are loved unconditionally. Maturity in love is knowing He loves us regardless of how we feel. If I, when I first got married, always brought home a bouquet of flowers every Friday for my wife and I did several things like that to let her know I love her for the first year we were married, then I suddenly quite doing it or they faded away, she would think I didn't love her anymore or at least less than before. We are hard wired, being selfish beings, to always expect something from each other. If I quite giving gifts, it doesn't mean I love her less, in fact she should know that after a year or more of my display of love for her, my love is established and not going anywhere. She however, still needs that affirmation and wants more displays of love. She becomes sad and distrusting thinking she did something wrong. She becomes angry and wants my full attention always. It's called insecurity and that is what drives a wedge between marriages and between our relationship with the Father.
If we only think He loves us when He is giving us something then we have made this mistake. We must understand that His love is everlasting towards us and that we do not need examples of His love all the time. If we lose that euphoric love feeling, we then feel as though God doesn't love us anymore. If He stops blessing us with gifts, do we then fall back into disbelief or do we trust and know He is always there for us.
We cannot pursue a constant flow of God by feelings. We must mature and know within that He loves us no matter what we feel. Feeling loved and knowing you are loved are two very different things. We must come to a point in our relationship with Him where we wake up each day knowing we are loved outside our attempts and outside our feelings. We cannot sustain a relationship with feelings. It must be changed from feeling loved to knowing you are loved in order for us to move forward in Him.
To God be the Glory!
No comments:
Post a Comment