We hang our sense of self-worth upon the mere trifles of
life, mere specks in a vast ocean of time. In the thick of the battles of
everyday life, we forget that all these daily concerns are not our ultimate
ground or our destiny; it is not for these things that we were made, but for
the glory of God. Regardless of whether we think we are "winning" or
"losing" in life, the truth is, God never stops loving us.
“What is truth,” Pilate asked Jesus. The truth to which Jesus
testified was not the sort of truth that one can objectively examine and
measure. Jesus taught that God is love. So what is true and what is false when
we have no empirical data to guide us? When confronted with the things of the
heart, when making the decision to believe in love, how do we know that love is
the right thing to do?
When speaking of love, we are not speaking of something
tangible, of something that we can examine, measure, weigh, and consider. We
are left to ponder the qualities that love makes manifest through its presence.
We recognize love by what love does. We recognize love by how it manifests
itself in our lives. We make a decision to live for the things of love or to
reject the things of love based on the way that love works in us and around us.
So, then, what are the manifestations of love? Paul tells us:
“Love is patient;
love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or
rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it
does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It
bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
But is love the right thing to believe in?
If we’ve been hurt by those that said they loved us, perhaps we may think that
love is a false pretense, something that only a fool, and a damn fool at that,
would continue to believe in. Having been hurt by those that claim to love us,
we may resolve to never to fall for the lie of love again. We reject love as a
reality for our lives. There is a bit of truth in this. Yes, it is true that
people will let us down. In fact, sooner or later, everyone will let us down in
some way.
Yet we cannot quiet the restless longing in
our hearts. We may fashion for ourselves a vision of being a solitary rock,
strong and serene, which needs no one and certainly does not need love, yet the
restlessness disturbs our serenity. We attack the restlessness with a myriad of
substitutes, with all the diversions and pleasures that the world has to offer,
yet despite all our efforts we feel disconnected, isolated, and insignificant. Our
life becomes reduced to an endless desperation, waiting out the seconds and
minutes and hours for death and oblivion to overtake us.
So it comes down to this: love is a risk.
We take a chance on love. By love, I do not mean the mere emotion that comes
and goes, but real love, the love that endures all things, no matter what. We
take a chance on loving and not being loved in return, on giving and getting
nothing back, on sacrificing and our sacrifice being counted for naught, for
such is the way that God Himself has loved us. God loves us even though we
reject him; he loves us and we do not love him in return; he sacrificed
everything for us and we consider it nothing. Despite all that, God persists in
loving us into life. We take a chance on being let down, hurt, and betrayed
because we recognize the power of love to transform and move us, to inspire and
to bring us life. Everyone will let us down, sooner or later, save one: God.
God will not stop loving us. Even when life has fallen into pieces and all our
plans have come to nothing and all we see is failure, when death itself is but
a moment away, God still loves us.
We stand, as it were, on a precipice. We
have a choice to make. Step out into the nothingness, into the vast chasm, and
trust that love will catch us, or remain where we are, fixed and frozen. It is
an act of faith, and faith is also a risk. We may see others take the leap and
see that they do not fall, but our own step forward is still marked by
hesitation and fear. We turn inward and fixate on all the times that people let
us down. We do not see that even at that moment, even before we take that step
forward, that God loves us with all his Being. Yes, it is an act of incredible
courage to believe in love, now more than ever, in our world of hate and
manipulation and exploitation. But the chasm into which we are stepping is not
the chasm of the world, and what appears to us to be a chasm is not a chasm at
all, but an entirely new world that we did not –could not– see from where we are
before we take that step. We step forward into the unknown and find that love
was there all along. Jesus taught that God is love and then showed us
the love of God in action. The love of God is total surrender to God, trusting
him to love us no matter what. Do we dare take him up on it?
