[I randomly found this sketch that I wrote a while ago…it may reveal more of my passionate nature than I generally reveal, and for the record, it was not written to any one specific person, but upon reading it over, I thought it was worth sharing, if only to provoke thought.]

on love

Honestly, I’m really tired of people making assertions about my love or questioning it. I am told, “There’s a difference, Christy, between ‘love’ and ‘love’” Oh, is there? Is there really?

Is not love a choice? Why must I ascribe to society’s idea of love being a feeling of falling “in-love” in order to say “I love you” to the person I’m dating? Is not love so much more? Is the assumption that if I say “I love you” to the person I am dating, that I am only talking about the “falling-in-love” type of love? Do not people know me better to know I have a deeper understanding of what love is and that I don’t use that word lightly when I say it?

Is not love a deep desire for another person’s best? Is not love a choice to be at someone’s side, even when the “feeling” is or is not there? Is not love so much more than what Hollywood and our culture screams at us? I don’t want to give or receive “shallow” love; I never have. If “love” is only, or primarily, to be determined by the butterflies in your stomach, by the excitement of another human being investing in your life, by the thrill of growing closer — mentally, physically, spiritually — then, yes, perhaps it’s “dangerous” to tell someone you love them before, oh, I dunno, six months. That seems like a good number, a good formula, a good rule to follow, doesn’t it? I wonder if it’s that my choice to tell others I love them is threatening to so many others who wouldn’t and don’t do the same?

Maybe it’s because I’m not playing by the rules. Is that it? It makes you uncomfortable; it’s outside the ordinary; it’s risky. Well, you know what? Loving anyone is risky. Ask C.S. Lewis, who wrote:

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglement; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

Ask Christ, who loved to the point of entering humanity and dying for us. Why are we so quick to judge other people and their love? Is it out of fear for them (she’s confusing “love” with “infatuation”) or is it out of fear for ourselves? Our constructs are being questioned; our boundaries are being challenged; our thoughts about love are being threatened. No one could possibly know whether they love someone until a certain period of time, right?

Who sold us that lie and when did we start to buy it?

I’ve heard so many times, “Love is too big of a word to use lightly and I hate when people use it often.” Rarely is that statement aimed directly at me, but in being stated, it is implicitly implicating me of “cheapening” the word because I do choose to use the word “freely.”

But am I cheapening it? Is my love for someone somehow less because I love many others? Do I only have a specific amount of love to give, and therefore, am spreading it “too thin” on too many people? When it really comes down to it, is not our fear of using that word “too much” and “too freely” a reflection that we are fearful of being hurt? It doesn’t have to be just in a dating relationship. We do this in other relationships as well. We don’t want to extend ourselves by saying it and giving it until we are SURE that our significant others, closest friends, and family members feel the same way and aren’t going to hurt us by their lack of love, or lack of love being equal to ours. So we hold on to it, selfishly not wanting to give until we have received, or until we are quite sure we will receive a reciprocal love. But is not loving someone in the way that Christ loves us a love that “does not seek its own”? Gives without thought to its own needs? And if we base our decisions about who we love upon a Biblical understanding of love, upon how God and Jesus love, does it not change how we should use that word and how we choose to interact with others?

Love is a choice; when it comes to significant others, the feelings of being “in love” may come and go; love is a commitment; love is an earnest desire for another person’s best; love is a desire for them to know the one, true Lord better and more intimately. If love is those things, can not - and should not - we be using the word more often and let go of our small-view ideas of “love” and start practicing Biblical love in a way that brings honor and glory to the Father?