Reflections on Love

I wrote the bulk of this post on Valentine’s Day 2008. Since then my thoughts on love and relationships have developed a little bit, but as I was going back through my old blog posts tonight I ran across this again and still really resonate with it. Since I wrote this originally as a Valentine’s Day “open letter” of sorts there are some particular references to the holiday, though I have tried to edit most of them out. Even so I hope that it might still be helpful to you. If you have the time to read this and have some feedback I’d love to hear it…

JRL+

Love is a complicated subject. Some people talk about it all the time and others seem to live as if it doesn’t exit. It doesn’t help that many in our wider culture do not fully understand what love is. Relationships too are complicated. Some people who are in them don’t want to be – and lots of people who are not in them want to be. But sometimes it seems that we don’t know where to begin. And when holidays like Valentine’s Day arrive each year it frequently becomes more difficult as we reflect on how we walk through life seemingly alone. So many people want to be in a relationship and for whatever reason aren’t. Maybe they haven’t met the right person – Or they have had their heart-broken and so are weary of taking the next step – Or they have never had a relationship at all and are afraid of what beginning one might mean. Maybe they are afraid of being rejected and so never ask someone they might be interested getting coffee with to get coffee – Or maybe they just get too busy and simply walk by each other. Whatever the reason it seems that as people get older the pressure to date and get married gets more intense from family, friends, and even self. And with the increase in pressure so does, at least for some, the anxiety. And the questions – “Am I ever going to get married?” “Am I ever going find my lost half?”

Despite all the reasons it has not happened there remains the desire to be in a relationship with someone who you can love and who can love you. Someone who will listen to you when you share your feelings and who yearns to share their feelings with you. People desire that person with whom they can sit with in silence and be perfectly comfortable. Someone to raise a family with. Someone to walk through this complicated and confusing thing called life with. Or someone simply to keep warm with on a rainy night. But even with so many people looking for love many people are still alone.

This desire for love is of course deeply rooted in all of us – indeed, I believe, it is formed and found in the Garden of Eden when God proclaims to Adam, “it is not good for man to be alone”. One of the most interesting explanations of the desire for love (outside of Scripture) is found in the writings the thought Plato. In his Symposium he tells the story of how the gods split human beings in two and now life is about searching for your other half and that love is connecting with that half when you find them. In the movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch the song “Origin of Love” tells the same story (below is the clip from the movie) = [FYI, the movie is rated R and there is some "nudity" in the line drawings - nothing at all graphic, but I wanted to provide a fair warning - I also realize that the "sexual ethic" of this film would be far from Biblical - that being said I think it is a moving, and somewhat helpful, clip]

The part of this song that I have been thinking about recently is the end:

Last time I saw you/We had just split in two/You were looking at me/I was looking at you/You had a way so familiar/But I could not recognize/’Cause you had blood on your face/I had blood in my eyes/But I could swear by your expression/That the pain down in your soul/Was the same as the one down in mine/That’s the pain/That cuts a straight line down through the heart/We call it love…

I think that this is where a lot of people are. We go through life searching for connections, whether romantic or not. With some people we find them and with others we don’t. Or we find one sort of connection and not the other. What most people are longing for however is that connection that they can call love. That connection with their “lost half.”

Until then however what are we to do – especially when it feels like all our feelings are being numbed. When it is hard to be happy and joyful, but equally hard to cry…What do you do when the only feelings you have are anxiety, despair, and general grumpiness…Or simply a numbness…And maybe even fear that you will soon forget how to love…

What we do until that year when we can send roses and chocolates to our valentines is we remember first that God loves us passionately. That God loves us so much that we are already complete and do not actually need to derive our self-worth from whether or not we have a boyfriend or a girlfriend – a husband or a wife. We then need to spend time building community and relationships with our friends (both male and female) – loving them wholeheartedly. Life is hard but it is always a little easier when you have good friends to go through it with. Community is vitally important and I thank God for the community that I have. Finally, we can pray. We can pray for God to bring us joy in our singleness and we can pray for a relationship. And we can even pray for our future spouse. (I’m going to get really personal here – so fair warning) On days where this matter is at the front of my mind I always feel better when I ask God to give a sense of comfort to the girl that I will hopefully one day date and marry – I pray that God will ease her anxiety and give her the same peace and joy in her singleness as I ask him to give me. It might sound a little weird to some people, but it has been meaningful to me. And in it God has brought me peace.

Well, now that I have gotten way too personal for the internet I’ll close. May you find the love you are longing for deep in your soul. May God strengthen your marriage and your other relationships. May God develop your friends and your community to show you love when you do not feel like you can give or receive it. And may God reveal to you the love that He has for you, so on those days when you feel especially alone you will know that though friends may leave you, though friends may hurt you, though you might not be in the type of relationship you desire at all, you are loved deeply by God and that will never change.

Finally, for those of you who do not receive these as often as you deserve…

Advertisement