When You Feel Unlovable
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Category Archives: love
To Interpret with Love
I have written recently about the difficulty of agreeing on Biblical interpretation. It is easy to draw lines in the sand and difficult to discern between what is cultural and what is truth that transcends place and time. It is easy to vilify those with whom we disagree and difficult to extend the grace of believing that they, too, are doing their best to follow Christ.
The ease of which I find myself speaking in terms of “us” and “them” while speaking of how we interpret the Bible forces me to search more deeply into how I see the Bible.
Do I view the Bible as a way to live my own life or do I look into its pages to search out ways of making me right and them wrong? Of even more eternal import, do I place the Bible as an idol above God? Do I view the Bible or Jesus as the Word of God?
It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is myth (but of course myth specially chosen by God from among countless myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and not read with attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons. ~ C.S. Lewis in a letter to a lady
When it does become necessary to know how to interpret a certain passage (only, as Lewis said, for my own spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity), to know whether it was only written to one particular culture or whether it should be obeyed in all times and places, I am learning that love should be my standard. It seems obvious when you think about what Jesus mandated as the most important of all the commands, but it is a standard for interpretation that I had never thought about before. Love is to be the standard for deciding which passages are cultural and which are universal.
Paul says in Romans that whatever commandment there may be, it can be summed up in the rule “love your neighbor as yourself”. He is, of course, writing of the Greek word agape when speaking of love. Agape is a selfless, sacrificial, unconditional sort of love. It is the kind of love that seeks out the best for others before it seeks for the good of itself. I think what Paul means, what Jesus means by “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” is that if we are truly living out God’s kind of love for others, we will always be led to do the right thing.
Even Jesus seems to apply the same principle to the Jewish Scriptures when He heals on the Sabbath or picks and eats grain on the Sabbath. Rather than defending Himself by saying that He is not technically breaking the Sabbath, in each case He argues that sometimes violating the letter of the law is necessary in order to act in love and fulfill the spirit of the law instead.
I have a lot more praying and studying to do about this, but this idea feels incredibly freeing. Rather than having to be a Bible scholar and know the ancient languages by heart, I can apply this standard of agape love and let God’s Spirit lead me to the best answer of whether a passage is cultural or for always. Paul speaks of slaves obeying their masters, but agape love demands their freedom. Paul’s rules about hair length and head coverings were good in his time and place, but they have no current relation to loving God or our neighbors.
We have been set free from the Law. We no longer live under the supervision of the Law but under grace. “What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?” Paul speaks to this many times, saying that we are not to use our freedom to indulge our own selfish impulses but that we are to use our freedom to serve each other in love. Love, agape love, is to be our standard, our way of deciding what is right and what is wrong, both in our deeds and in God’s Word.
After all, as we see in the story of the judgement in Matthew 25, Christ knows us by our actions as we serve the outcasts, the hungry, the sick, the poor, and the imprisoned.
But Jesus provides no list of beliefs at all. People are judged not on what they believe but on how they have loved. ~ Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith
Freedom
Freedom.
We value freedom quite highly here in the States. We make it one of our highest goals to obtain freedom for everyone.
Freedom is a noble and worthy goal, isn’t it? It is a good that we as Christ-followers support, right? Even Jesus, after all, speaks of setting us free.
Yes, however…
Many of us who have grown up in the States have become confused about what freedom means. We think that freedom means living without limits, being able to make our own choices, casting off all restraint.
This is not freedom. This is autonomy. Autonomy is a very different thing.
So what is freedom? In the world of Jesus, what does freedom mean?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer talks about freedom in Creation and Fall, his commentary on the first few chapters of Genesis. He speaks of us being created in the image of the Triune God says that one of the implications of this is that we are meant to be relational beings. Being created as relational beings means that we are dependent. Dependent on God and dependent on each other.
This freedom we are given by being made in God’s image is, Bonhoeffer says, “a relation and nothing else. To be more precise, freedom is a relation between two persons. Being free means ‘being-free-for-the-other’, because I am bound to the other. Only by being in relation with the other am I free.”
Yes, we are free, but free within our relationships. Yes, we are free, but it is a freedom with limits, a freedom with boundaries. It is a freedom that only makes sense within the context of our relationships.
It is the sort of freedom that a cellist in an orchestra has.
A cellist who asserts her autonomy while playing a Rachmaninoff symphony will only cause sour notes and chaos. A cellist who asserts her freedom within the confines of the orchestral relationships around her creates art and beauty. She is free to bring out the best within herself only because she willingly submits herself to the limits of the piece and the limits placed by the conductor.
Insisting on and clinging to our autonomy creates only sour notes and chaos.
Being set free, however, asserting our freedom for those around us…
This.
This gives beauty, peace, joy. This kind of freedom is what brings out our best, most true selves.
Art credits: Bonhoeffer plaque from Wiki Commons; Cellist photo from Amanda Wen
Keep Fighting
To live life well is hard.
It is difficult to live deliberately, to continue to work for the good of yourself and those you love. It is easier to coast, to react, to let things slide.
For myself, it is easier to let the clutter pile up than to keep our house feeling like a home. It is easier to read mind-candy sorts of novels than to ponder the nature of our God and this universe. It is easier to let my children learn on their own or through their schools, to allow my girls get away with small acts of unkindness and to be passive in the way they discover God than to fight for their hearts and their minds. It is easier to let my relationship with my husband drift, to sit in our separate corners in the evenings than to work to know him and enjoy him.
Often I do not want to fight. I do not want to fight for what is good. I do not want to fight for what is God-honoring and God-pleasing.
Yet I fight anyway. I fight because I love and, in this world anyway, loving requires you to fight.
I don’t fight perfectly, though. I fight in fear of the needs that others have. I fight in fear of my own inability to give anything good. I fight in fear of doing the wrong thing and causing irreparable harm.
But still I fight, imperfect as it may be. I fight in obedience to One who fought for me.
Just like you. You go and you fight. You go to the bedside of the sick or even the dying and you fight. You go to the home of someone who is lonely and you fight. You go to a meeting of a church group in need of volunteers and you fight. You go to the food pantry, the orphanage, the shelter, and you fight. You go to funeral, the party, the study, and you fight.
We go because it is where His way leads us; and again and again we are blessed by our going in ways we can never anticipate, and our going becomes a blessing to the ones we go to because when we follow His way, we never go entirely along, and it is always something more than just ourselves and our own emptiness that we bring. ~ Frederick Buechner
So keep going. Keep fighting. And be blessed because when you go and when you fight, you are never fighting alone.
Art credit: photo of Christ carrying the cross by Asta Rastauskiene
Family
Imagine that you are out taking a walk in your neighborhood and you stroll down a street that is a little unfamiliar. The road is lined with sidewalks and trees, the houses are evenly spaced with a bit of yard for each. The houses are nothing fancy, just small, American Dream with a white picket fence sorts of houses. As you stroll along, just as the shadows begin to lengthen and the creeping dusk begins to carry with it the scent of a coming rain, one lighted window catches your eye. You pause and find yourself caught by an image. Young adults, seated around a table with a card game on it, joined by an older couple. Children playing together on the floor. A gray-haired elderly man walks in using a cane. You are not sure why the scene has so captivated you, you really must be getting home before the rain begins to fall, but something about the sight of extended family enjoying each other’s company keeps you rooted for longer than you should have stayed.
What are your thoughts as you stand there, feeling chilled by the damp in the air yet unwilling to walk away just yet? Are you filled with a longing you can’t quite explain? Does it remind you of your own family and the time you had with them just the other week? Do you wonder what bitter fights and disappointments lurk in a room more removed from the street views?
What is it about a family?
We all want one. Even those who say they don’t need anyone around would, I dare say, wish deep inside for a perfect family to love them.
Even the word itself brings a picture of love and peace, acceptance and light. The idea of multiple generations caring for one another is enough to set our hearts yearning for an ideal.
Does family really matter? In this world that would tell us that career is more important than children, that independence is better than living intertwined, is family truly that important?
Yes. Emphatically yes.
Families were designed to bring us back to God. There is much about the workings of a family that draws us in, that points our hearts toward God.
The miracle of the birth of a baby, for instance, turns your mind toward thoughts of God, especially God as Father. When you hold your own baby for the first time, your heart is drawn to mystery, drawn to contemplate the miracle of creation. I just read this in WORLD magazine:
The baby daughter of writer Whittaker Chambers helped to move him from Communism to Christ. Chambers wrote inWitness (1952), “My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear—those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: ‘No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.’”
These children are gifts from God sent to turn us back to Him.
Other purposes of family? Those who have been raised in godly families are more able to see the goodness of submitting to God’s authority because they have seen how good life is when we submit to the authority of our parents. Birth and death connect us to God far beyond most other events in our lives, and we can truly experience this connection best if we are surrounded not by institution alone but by those who know and love us best.
Our families are shrinking in size. We think nothing of moving far away from our parents and grandparents. We fill our lives with so many activities that we lose sight of the hearts of those who are most precious to us.
Sometimes these things are unavoidable. Yet if we do not at least deliberate and ponder this mystery of what was intended by the One who created the very idea of family, I fear that we will lose something sacred, some thing that keeps us close to the heart of God.
And anything that keeps us close to the heart of God is too rare and precious to be tossed away careless.
Joy Wrapped with Sorrow
My littlest turned one this week.
She is a New Year’s baby, the first of the year in our county. In my own opinion, it would be difficult to find a better way to bring joy and hope to a new year than with a perfect baby.
She passed her Papa on her way to us.
My dear friend, Martha Cook, said it well: And so your Papa stood at Heaven’s Gate. He saw as she passed by. He blew a kiss. “Samantha,” he said, “God is sending you to the best of families.” Then he turned and entered into the arms of the God he served. Well done. Well done.
It is a truth of this world that joy is wrapped up with sorrow. You cannot have one without the other.
It is the way of this world and it is the way of our God. He loves us, knowing that the joy of His love will be enveloped in sorrow. He loves us while He bears our grief and our sorrow.
If God Himself bears both joy and sorrow, how can we expect anything different?
Yet we do. We expect joy without sorrow, love without grief. When the grief and sorrow come, we shake our fists at this God and ask why?
And we should ask why, but a why of a different kind. Why, God? Why would You choose to love us when we continually turn our faces from You? Why would You choose to take our grief and sorrow upon Yourself? Why did You come to our rescue instead of leaving us to the fate we brought on ourselves?
We will not, in this life, have joy without sorrow. We can either try to live this life with God or without Him. With Him, the joys are brighter and the sorrows are lighter.
So breathe in and breathe out.
We receive what You give; We give thanks for what You give.
Above all, we give thanks for You.
Art credits: Gethsemane by Carl Bloch; Three Crosses by Rembrandt; Going to Emmaus by Robert Zund; Christ and Samaritan Woman by Henryk Siemiradzki
Are You Going Home for Christmas?
Are you going home for Christmas?
It is, perhaps, a time of year when we most think about home. Many of us think back to a particular place, a place where we were given gifts of peace and compassion, grace and love. We think of those people, or perhaps one person in particular, who gave those gifts to us. Those who were not given such gifts had at least, perhaps, the dream of such a home.
We try, in our own ways, to create that sort of a home in our adult lives, yet it is difficult sometimes to believe that such a home can exist in this world, this world that makes it hard to believe in much of anything at times.
In every home, however, no matter how full of beauty and love, there is something missing. Something small but crucial. Perhaps we can’t fully describe what that something is, but we search for it and long for it our entire lives. It is something that gives us a sad and lost feeling, something that makes us feel a bit homeless wherever we happen to be.
This small but crucial missing piece is what the author of Hebrews talks about at the end of that great chapter detailing those who lived by faith. After naming some of the greatest heroes and heroines of our faith, the author writes,
These all died in faith, not having received what was promised, but having seen it and greeted it from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.
And so home is, after all, only where Christ is. Home is at the manger where even the oxen kneel at midnight. Home is at the foot of the cross and at the door to the empty tomb. Home is the place we will find when we finally know even as we are fully known.
I believe that…the home we long for and belong to is finally where Christ is. I believe that home is Christ’s kingdom, which exists both within us and among us as we wend our prodigal ways through the world in search of it. ~ Frederick Buechner
Are you going home for Christmas?
On Them Has Light Shone
We are people walking in darkness.
Our souls are dark with selfishness and pride. We are blinded by our own interests so that we cannot truly see anyone else, so that we cannot see God. We seek and chase after happiness, darkened in our false understanding that we can find anything good outside of Jehovah.
We dwell in a land of deep darkness.
We live in a world where children are born needing new hearts, where babies emerge into poverty and hunger. We ache with the knowledge that storms destroy, that hurt people wound, that cancer kills.
We hang our heads to the ground in shame and weep in this darkness brought about by our own turning away from God. Where is hope?
Lift up your head, world that is heavy with darkness. Look up and see a great light.
Rise up from the ground, you who are burdened with shame. On you a light has shone.
A light has dawned. A great light has emerged out of the darkness. His name is Christ the Lord. He is Savior and Messiah. He is Mighty God and Prince of Peace. He brings peace to this world and peace to our souls. He is Ruler and King, He is Servant and Love.
We no longer must dwell in darkness but can run strong in the light.
Unto us a son is born, unto us a child is given.
The light has come and we are free. Free from darkness, free to love.
Where is hope? Hope is here.
For unto you is born this day a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.
Christ is here.
Christ has come!
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone.
(Isaiah 9.2)
Art credit: Fifth and last photos by Kirk Sewell Photography.
Waiting
Waiting. Breathless. Hopeful. Fearful.
Watching. Gazing intently at this flickering light. It is a light that at times appears so feeble it sometimes seems that it could be extinguished by a whisper.
At times we blow gently, hoping the light will flare up and blaze forth to push out the darkness. At other times we hide in the dark, weeping a prayer, desperate not to let our deep, ugly parts be known.
We desire the light and we fear it. This light is love. It is not a weak, self-centered, human love. This is mighty and humble, king and servant, cross- and pain-bearing love.
This is Love who will take that flickering candlelight and fan it into flame that overcomes darkness, even our own. Flame that someday will refine and purify our entire world, purging away dross and imperfection, giving to all of us redeemed perfection results.
And we wait. Wait for Christmas. Wait for Christ. Wait to be known. Wait to be redeemed.
We wait with our breath held. We wait with a labored kind of waiting, waiting with pregnant hope for our world to be reborn.
And while we wait, we work. We serve. We keep our eyes fixed on that flickering light.
We still weep and fear, but more than that, we love. We can love through our fear because we who wait have seen the end. And this fearful love that will destroy our world and even our very selves will bring out of the ashes a world and a self that is truer and more beautiful than any we could have imagined. Love Himself will bring us through.
And the waiting will be over.
There are wild things
just beyond the creche.
Pry loose an Advent
candle from its round
wreath and walk straight
past the doe-eyed virgin,
deeper into the world
he was born to save.
Jettison your meekness.
Cup your hand over the
flame, you’ll be exposed.
No, don’t look for a star.
Instead listen for the carol
of the trees as the wind
repeats its sounding joy.
You’ll feel more lost than
saved but that’s how the
prophets say it will feel
the closer your journey to
the coming arrival.
~ The Beautiful Due
A Flickering Flame of Light
Much of the time it doesn’t work out this way because this world is so broken and can be so dark, but every once in a while you are allowed to be a part of, or at least catch a glimpse of, something that points toward something more, something bigger, something so sacred that you want to cup it gently in your hands, speak of it only in whispers, breathe soft so as not to disturb it.
There is a boy. A boy who grows up. A boy who falls in love with and marries a girl. A girl who discovers she is pregnant with a son and fast on the heels of that revelation discovers that she is dying. There is a boy. A boy who sinks down. A boy who clings to his son in order to keep his face above the waves that are drowning him. A boy who continues to seek God even though most of the time he is not convinced that such a God exists and all of the time feels an anger toward Him that threatens to burn his heart into ashes.
There is a God. A God who longs to be found, who deals gently and softly with those who are wounded. A God who slowly soothes and cleanses and heals the heart of a boy using, in part, the heart of a girl.
There is a girl. A girl who has lost the mother she loves yet chooses to cling to the God who gifted her such a mother in the first place. A girl who loved a boy yet was willing to give the boy up to God to be sure that his newly healed heart belonged to God alone.
There is a boy and there is a girl and, most of all, there is a God. A God who is using a story and a wedding and a marriage to tell me and to tell you that there is hope and there is truth and above all there is love. A God who wants you to know as you sit in the dark, hiding or weeping or perhaps both at the same time, that there is light in this dark.
Perhaps it seems like just a candle flame in the dark, flickering uncertainly as though a whisper might extinguish it, but I saw this weekend in the beauty of a wedding that this tiny flame will spread and will pierce the darkness and the darkness will not overcome it.
What I saw this weekend in the crazy-loud joy, in the riotous music and lights, in the feasting and laughing and wide-open grins made me want to jump up with my arms flung out and shout Silence! Listen to the small voice, to the message so sacred and precious, so unbelievable and so true that it makes you stand rooted to the spot with Thomas and whisper My Lord and my God.
Christ is risen. Hold it gently in all of its holiness. He is risen, and because He is risen, His love never fails. In your darkness, in your brokenness, in your fears and doubts and loneliness and amidst all of the shattered pieces that might never get put back together in this life, He loves you and His love never fails.
Much of the time it doesn’t work this way, but this weekend I was a part of something that points toward something bigger and brighter and truer. It is precious and it is holy, so lean close and hear me proclaim in a whisper this thing that is unbelievable and so true. Christ is risen. He is risen and His love never fails you and even though we never fully emerge from the darkness in this life, one day there will be nothing but crazy-loud joy and riotous music and feasting and laughing and light, such bright and brilliant light that the darkness will flee in terror to the deepest of the depths.
So take heart. Be brave and strong and true, and let Him shape your hearts into hearts that are beautiful, hearts that bear to each other that precious, flickering holy flame of love. Take heart.
Psalm 20
May the Lord answer you in the day of trouble!
May the name of the God of Jacob protect you!
May he send you help from the sanctuary
and give you support from Zion!
May he remember all your offerings
and regard with favor your burnt sacrifices! Selah
May he grant you your heart’s desire
and fulfill all your plans!
May we shout for joy over your salvation,
and in the name of our God set up our banners!
May the Lord fulfill all your petitions!
Now I know that the Lord saves his anointed;
he will answer him from his holy heaven
with the saving might of his right hand.
Some trust in chariots and some in horses,
but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.
They collapse and fall,
but we rise and stand upright.
Art Credits: Christ Healing the Blind Man by Eustache Le Sueur; Graphic of The Golden City