May 10, 2010

Greetings My Friend A couple of passages in the Bible are speaking to me right now about love. What is true love and how does it operate is the question I ask myself often. When I hear sermons on love I understand that the love I know is not healthy but at times it is the only way I can give love from my fractured mindset. Celebrate Recovery has a group for people with this mindset and if I were around a group I would think on going to it. Allowing myself to be abused should have been my first clue that loving was off kilter for me. Sometimes I see that these groups in Celebrate Recovery are more overlapping than we realize. The first passage appears in both the OT and the NT and it reads "Love God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul. The 2nd is love your neighbor as yourself." Love my neighbor as myself means I need to love myself first. Counseling kept teaching me that I am no good to anyone if I keep giving until I am so spent I can't give anymore. It seemed selfish of me to want to take care of myself and then I learn to love my neighbor as myself and God is telling me in order to give healthy love I need to first love myself. If you know me by now you realize that I am going to keep digging and wandering around this point. It is a bone to be chewed on until I slowly begin to wrap my mind around it. The first question I have is...so what does love really truly look like? God is so awesome because about now I am told to look up. "Father...I know You are love but? The way only He can do He begins to point me to look at the cross, at Jesus' birth, how Sara conceived at 90 years old, God took the people of Israel out of Egypt and they crossed the sea and God finally stops all the way back to Adam and Eve. I see God not pleased with them, but after He kicks them out of the garden God did not just leave them, he killed an animal, made clothes for Adam and Eve. I am beginning to see love in action and it is not an enabling love but an abling love. God will equip us to love as He loves. My spider web begins to weave here and there and I wonder how I am able to learn to love the way God loves. While I am absorbed in the times I loved in an enabling way to keep those I was loving in their dysfunction I begin to see how I was making excuses for their bad behavior.I had such excuses as they had a hard life or they can not read very well so it is my job to "fix" them. Life has taught me that the only person I can fix is myself unless that person wants to fix themselves it is a useless endeavor. While I am pondering I almost hear God say, "over here Janet," something seems to guide my eyes back to my study lesson I am reading "love your neighbor as yourself," on the page in the Bible. "I get it I say out loud." I understand that if I want to learn to love the way God loves then I need to read the Bible, not only listen to the preacher or a book a famous author wrote about the Bible but the Bible itself. Slowly I feel another verse that has danced around in my thoughts often found in the NT, "husbands love your wives as yourself." When I stumbled across this verse I first saw men, even women who ran themselves ragged, over eaters and even those caught up in addiction trying to love as they care for their own bodies. I saw the physical aspects of loving not the "heart" of love. We all will fall short because we are in a fallen world, more recently I keep learning the "heart" message and some days I totally get it. I think back to when I met Junior. I remember thinking he was okay looking but being enamored with his heart. Somehow I saw the genuine heart of love. I saw his loyalty in all things. I am the first to admit going to his house the first time wondering about a ladder living in the living room so he could put an air purifer on it to clean the air and thinking "oh...nice?" Even though I felt drawn to Junior. We still see things differently often at the end of the day I don't want to be anywhere else but with Junior. We work on the problem until we meet in the middle. He works with me which opens the door for me to want to work with him. He loves me as he loves himself and I learn being different is not so bad. God will give me the tools to love as He loves if I am willing to listen and then put what I learn into action. My last thought is "it is that simple?" My God bless you and keep you make His face shine on you. Love Janet