If You Love Someone...

One of the wonderful, unexpected side-effects to love is that you're forced, albeit often kicking and screaming, to confront your own selfishness. Like the Polaroid photo that's shaken while developing (sounds like a song?), expect to have your heart rocked before your love (or lack of it) comes into focus.

It's the relational secret we'd like most to avoid; eHarmony probably won't detect it. Yet its roots are as old as the garden, and just as snakey. What is it? We love to get our own way.

Take marriage, for example - a common counseling scenario. The once-blissful couple has, to use an apt metaphor, let their precious garden fill with weeds, and at some point one or both makes the decision not to get up off the couch (or move from the computer, or say "no" to the million other available distractions and pursuits) and aggressively pull them up. Soon after, because weeds grow like...well, weeds, they're jolted into action by an icy wind; a chilly interaction, a hard stare, or a bitter remark makes one look out the window and notice that the garden is nearly gone.

Ugh ... how quickly is everything that makes love so good and nourishing easily swallowed up by a selfish green weed-monster called "a divided heart." Before you know it you'll be using the "two ships passing in the night" cliché as well. 

 

The Cost

So what to do? How do you love when it gets really hard to engage another and you want to say "enough!" The only way I know that you can possibly do this is to grasp the profound meaning of what love really is; that in essence, as Tim Keller notes in King's Cross, "all life-changing love [the kind that really transforms you] is substitutionary sacrifice." 

Do you struggle with the cross of Christ? Has it been your idea - maybe somewhere in the back of your mind - that the whole story-line involving the cross on which Jesus died is just too much like a blood sacrifice to appease an irritable, blood-thirsty, and capricious god - the kind you might have heard of in primitive religions or read about in the works of Homer? If so, take a look at the cross from a new angle - the angle of relationship as we have been thinking about. Keller notes,

"Think about it. If you love a person whose life is all put together and has no major needs, it costs you nothing. It's delightful. There are probably four or five people like that where you live. You ought to find them and become their friend. But if you ever try to love someone who has needs, someone who is in trouble or who is persecuted or emotionally wounded, it's going to cost you. You can't love them without taking a hit yourself. A transfer of some kind is required, so that somehow their troubles, their problems, transfer to you.

There are a lot of wounded people out there. They are emotionally sinking, they're hurting, and they desperately need to be loved ... The only way they're going to start filling up emotionally is if somebody loves them, and the only way to love them is to let yourself be emotionally drained. Some of your fullness is going to have to go into them, and you have to empty out to some degree. If you hold onto your emotional comfort and simply avoid those people, they will sink. The only way to love them is through substitutionary sacrifice."

Do you see how there is always a cost to the lover? It will inevitably cost you to love someone well, to pour into a spouse, child, hurting friend, or the needy outcast on the street. (Jesus was saying exactly this when he crossed all kinds of ethnic and social boundaries with his "Good Samaritan" parable, see Luke 10:25-37).

This may sound overwhelming, even impossible, and it is - on your own. But when you begin to see this in light of your own selfish heart, you're just starting to tap into the profound power of the cross - that it cost God Himself - and then it becomes especially good news for you:

"God demonstrates His own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (Rom. 5:8)

You see for those of us addicted to our own way, this comes as especially good news. For if God loved the way we so often do - when people seem deserving enough - we'd all be lost. But He doesn't, thankfully, and so the cross stands forever as the greatest, one-sided gift ever given. Only as you internalize this truth and faith springs up again, are you energized to love, and keep loving when it hurts.  

When the Lily Dies

I love how Keller fleshes this out further, using the character of Lily Potter:

"...When the Voldemort-possessed villain tries to lay hands on Harry, he experiences agonizing pain, and so he is thwarted. Harry later goes to Dumbledore, his mentor, and asks, "Why couldn't he touch me?" Dumbledore replies that "Your mother died to save you ... love as powerful as your mother's for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign ... [but] to have been loved so deeply ... will give us some protection forever."

   

Are you willing to see God as a "mother" like this? (See Isa. 66:13, Matt. 23:37) The beauty of submitting yourself to be loved like this by Jesus, to receive life and protection from his death, is that you will begin to change - for love always changes things. Even more wonderful is the fact that it comes to the undeserved, as the Romans verse above shows us. So as selfishness tries to rear its ugly head today, let the words of an old hymn also fill your mind...

When I survey the wondrous cross,

On which the Prince of glory died...

my richest gain, I count but loss,

and pour contempt on all my pride.

As you grasp this, again and again, your love will become more like Jesus, your Rescuer; sacrificial, humble, and less about self (your main problem). You will begin to see the world with new eyes. And one day, when you look out your window, you will even see beautiful fruit growing on the vine.