When hurt makes love hard

I wrote this post almost a year ago and never published it. Honestly, I forgot I ever wrote it! So...here it is...
What if God instructed us to love with the forewarning that we’d be hurt, disappointed, mistreated or disregarded in return? Would we even bother with love? Most of us already anticipate these things to happen from the jump. So we love with guards and restrictions to protect ourselves. As a result, we go through life simply doing the best we can with what we have and hope that it gets us by. But this form of love carries no victory.


I was there before, and it got me nowhere. As I’ve grown and experienced love in different life relationships with family, friends, and loved ones, I now see how different our love is from God’s. Naturally, we tend to love one of two ways: the way someone loved us, or the way we’ve always wanted someone to love us. Both have their pros and cons and are flawed. The sure way to love is to love like Christ loves us – beyond our faults, without partiality, just the way we are. But as blemished human beings who have a difficult time getting over our hurts, this seems impossible to do.


Our parents could only teach us what they were taught to a certain degree. They could only love the way they had been shown love, or show us the type of love they always wished they had received by spoiling us. Thus, we are all passed down a flawed view of what love is. God had to teach me how to love all over again. And so far what I’ve learned is that God’s love doesn’t miss anything. It carries with it everything we need to get through life, including forgiveness, patience, long-suffering, and more. It’s a divine love that has the miraculous capacity to heal us from hurt and give us the power to love in spite of. And the key to accessing this love is to learn how to love him and be in relationship with him. For instance, when he forgives us, we learn how to forgive. When he’s patient with us, we learn how to be patient with others. Obtaining the love of God doesn’t mean we’ll never be hurt. But his love carries healing also. Remember, God’s love doesn’t miss anything. After all, it is love that the bible says fulfills the whole law. If I can simply learn how to love people, I have accomplished the greatest success in life man can ever do.


Love, I’ve discovered is acquired similarly to faith. Can the love of God be obtained through simply asking for it and be placed in our hearts and we just magically have it? On the contrary, like faith, it is something that has to be built in us through experiences. How is it proven that we have no faith if we’re never placed in the middle of a trying test? Likewise, how can we know we lack the love of God if we’re never hurt to a point where we have a hard time forgiving? Emotions carry us but so far. What happens after they run out? It is God’s divine love that stretches us beyond our human capacity to love and regard others, even after we’ve been wronged. It’s the only thing that can sustain us. And it is acquired by building relationship with God. “If you love me you’ll keep my commandments.” If you ask me to keep something for you, you expect that no matter what happens or what situations arise, when you return I’ll still have what you gave me. That’s how God expects us to regard his instructions. In learning how to keep the commandments of God, we learn how to be careful not to offend, dishonor, or displease him – all the ways in which we should aim to regard one another as well. So we can safely come to this conclusion - there is no love without God. There is only feeling, emotion, regard – all in which eventually runs out. God (our test pilot) wants us to love him so we can model that love for him after one another. It gives “…love the Lord thy God with all thy heart…and love thy neighbor as thyself” [Mark 12:30] an enhanced meaning to me now. It’s the formula for our growth.


You may say, “I don’t need God to know how to love somebody.” And I’d have to firmly disagree. We’re human and if we hurt enough times, love won’t look so attractive anymore and we will soon quit! I quit at one point or another. Not until we begin to regard God’s commandments and understand his way will we learn how to love those who hurt us and how to forgive them. It doesn’t happen overnight, but daily applying this to our life works. If you find a better way, email me and let me know. But I’m certainly convinced that there is no love like the divine love of God. And there is no hurt that the love of God cannot penetrate through and heal.

L8r:
~faithful