We were made to love and be loved. Love for God (agape), love of family / friends (phileo), romantic / intimate love for another (eros). It is more of a life sustaining need than air or water; for though I may die physically without the latter … I will never have even lived without the former. Thus, it is understandable that many genuinely long for love. That this longing exists is both a glory and a travesty. Glorious, that we were created with the innate capacity to hold and be continually filled with such a wonder, as love; that by design … spills over upon filling us … so as to fill others. Tragic, in that in the absence of love we begin to starve for the very essense of life itself; so that nothing possesses any measure of joy without some measure of this seasoning to give it taste.
Longing for love may seem utterly Hallmark; but is none-the-less, true. C.S. Lewis said, about longing … that so often, we long to hear from God … to the degree that the longing is equivalent to a scream. That ironically, we must get past the longing in some respects to begin to hear God’s voice, at all. I believe this is true, in every aspect of longing; including love. I believe we can desire, crave, pine for, need, and seek love … to the extent we are in no way prepared to simply welcome it, as it must be received.
I have been in particular environments of late whereby 1 Corinthians 13 (the “Love Chapter”) has been reviewed and discussed, much. My God, the literal ocean of views, ideas, philosophies, and teachings surrounding love is often representative of a longing that can be all-consuming, at times; …. one giant scream. As you read through 1 Corinthians 13, you take in the varying descriptions of what love is. You find that it isn’t merely a collection of adjectives. If you can push aside the scream surrounding the assessment, you begin to see that the paradox of love’s complexity is simplicity and comfort. The goodness of love is always aimed away from oneself. That’s where it really begins to become the incredibly awesome thing we long for. To pour ourselves out for others … for another … as we savor every nuance of who and what they are that moves and delights us.
Seeing the fullness of love is a bit like looking, at the sun. You simply, cannot see the fullness and goodness and warmth and pleasure and blessing and breathless joy of love without looking away from it slightly. Letting it burn as the incredible source of fire, intimacy, trust, beauty, blessing, sharing and sheer delight that it is through God. Just as we have to use special filters to look at the sun, I assert that you cannot see the glory of love without looking at it though the very Heart of Love; Christ.
As we look away from the longing-of-love and fix our gaze on the Origin-of-Love, (Christ) … we allow the scream of the love-longing to become distant … and the blessing of love-being to come into view. It may and probably will look different than we anticipated. But it will approach us with an openness that is inherent to genuine love. It will possess those properties of simplicity, comfort, beauty, and “fit” … that can only be crafted by the Creator.
