So This Is What Love Looks Like
It’s a word we throw around so casually but I wonder sometimes, are we really getting it? To know and be known – to love and be loved – it’s the greatest human desire, right? It drives our addictions and behaviors, our personalities, our music and art and culture. We spend our lives trying to find and feed those relationships that show the most promise of meeting this fundamental need.
And without it, we wither.
I hear a lot of stories in the counseling room. Stories of loss and the resiliency of the human spirit, stories of strong enduring love and heartbreakingly painful love and everything in between. When you offer someone a block of time, a safe space and an invitation to unpack, secrets tend to spill out like water. It’s as if whatever was lodged in there, keeping things packed in all nice and neat, becomes dislodged and things begin to flow and emotions and fears and resentments come out that may have been tucked away for years. And usually … almost always … it’s about the relationships.
Our basest fears can often be whittled down to a fear of losing relationship, of losing (or never finding) our sense of belonging. We simultaneously fear and long to be fully known, because after all, if I’m fully known will I still be loved?
We’re constantly being bombarded with other people’s ideas about what love is.
Well I have some good news for you, sweet friend. You are both fully known and fully loved by the One who designed you from the start. The Creator of the universe calls you by name, knows every fiber of your being and every desire of your heart and loves you with a love so fierce and extravagant and supreme nothing else can come close.
We’re constantly being bombarded with other people’s ideas about what love is. Movie producers, songwriters and bestselling authors, the next-door neighbor, the local mom group, your parents, your kids … everyone has their own version of how it should look. We all know our love language and we all want to feel loved in our own language.
Personally I’m an Acts of Service girl. Sure I love words of affirmation telling me I’m valued and appreciated but mostly, just show me. Help with the dishes, take out the trash, pick up some groceries. During our last trip to North Carolina for our tiny house renovation, Darron spent an entire day tackling the wiring and framework to hang a couple of pendant lights in the bedroom, just because I saw a picture on Pinterest and I wanted pendant lights by the bed! Those lights will forever be a testament of his love for me.
I think love is not measured so much by what we say but by what we do. It’s not just something we feel. It’s something we show. And very often it’s something we do with our hands. Maybe it looks like a home-cooked meal or a hand-built Pinterest project. Sometimes it looks like a young sleep-deprived mom rocking her baby at 3am or wiping hair off the sweaty brow of a sick child. It’s the hands of a hospice worker patiently spoon-feeding the elderly patient during his final days, the hands that reach out to embrace a grieving friend, hands that farm the ground to feed hungry kiddos.
And once, long ago, it was the hands of a kneeling Savior, washing the grimy feet of a ragtag group of men. These hands that would soon be nailed to a cross, bleed clear through and hold the Son of God high and outstretched to a watching, broken world. The same hands that had restored sight to the blind man’s eyes, reached out to touch the untouchables, lifted Peter out of the waves, comforted Mary and Martha in their grief and fed the multitudes. These hands would cook a meal of bread and fish over a fire on the beach – after being in the grave three days – and welcome that ragtag gang back to shore with all the joy and excitement fathomable.
And these nail-scarred, divine, strong, steady hands are still outstretched, inviting, gathering in every modern-day ragtag, renegade and wounded warrior who just wants to belong, to matter, to say yes to the invitation.
Ah. So that’s what love looks like. Kinda takes your breath away, doesn’t it?
