“What are you looking for?” he asked.
A simple question.
“Someone who loves God more than he loves me.” I said. “Someone who loves to travel and has a spirit of adventure. Someone who values family—even if theirs is not great.”
Silence fell. I was nervous. These were answers that I knew, but when I said them aloud they fell short. What was I looking for? I had found men that fit these traits, but still fell short. Was it me? Was I requiring too much? I thought about it for days and then I had a conversation with a much loved friend. She felt similarly and I asked her the same question. “What are you looking for?” Her response was beautiful. She wanted to feel loved. She wanted to feel valued. She wanted the same things that I wanted, but she did not believe that she was worthy. Her past dating history had proven that. Guys had ripped her heart out of her chest and trampled on it.
Did we give too freely of ourselves? We wondered. We talked for hours and in the end we realized that we knew less than when we had begun. We knew what we were looking for, but we did not know if we would find it. We wanted to believe that it was true, but nothing pointed in that direction.
Or so we thought.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that conversation though. It just kept playing over and over again in my mind. Have you read the book the Perks of Being a Wallflower? Even if you haven’t I am certain you have heard that one beautiful quote that stopped me in my tracks and left me a bit of a blubbering mess after reading it for the first time.
“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
Simple. Poignant. True.
The first time I encountered this quote I had a strange notion of love. I wrote this blog
At the time I was naïve enough to believe that soul mates existed, but the heart of the statement is still there, “What type of love do we think we deserve?”
I think for girls like my friend and I there is not a real answer to that question. Not a direct one at least because we often feel undeserving of love so where do we begin? Well, I just finished reading Prototype by Jonathan Martin—a book I recommend to everyone—and on the very first page he says this:
“So, who are you? Forgive me for being so forward. I know we’ve only just met. I don’t mean to be abrupt or intrusive. But if we’re going to say anything truthful about becoming more like Jesus, surely we have to tell the truth about ourselves first. I know it’s a little premature to be disrobing our souls to one another. On the other hand, if you read books the way most people do—in the bedroom or bathroom or squeezed into an uncomfortably small seat on an overcrowded airplane, shielded by the false privacy of headphones—this is already a pretty intimate thing we’re doing. Besides our lives are too important to remain hidden behind self-protective social graces. So, let’s get right to it.What if it were possible to know your true identity? What if it were possible to hear the name we were given before the foundation of the world? What if it were possible to be so truly and fully alive—so fully human—that no matter what happened, you would be able to live without fear?”
And that final question (I added the rest to give you an idea of Martin’s heart. Isn’t he delightful?) resonates with me. What if that were possible?? What if I could truly see myself the way that I know that God does? If I did what type of love would I feel deserving of then? I think it is unfair of me to think any other way and in that light I see the men in my life in a new way. If I got any part of that early blog post right it was the thought that the love we all deserve is a love where we feel loved in return! I know that is true and obviously that is something we all desire, but we need to feel it strongly and confidently and I do not know how to get there. Perhaps a lack of faith holds me back? (Dear God, help my unbelief!) Lack of evidence of it in my own life through my parents and grandparents, lack of execution in the guys that have dated me. It just all seems to point to this vicious cycle of disappointments that leads me to cry out, “God, why am I even trying?” I guess in the end though the answer is because my heart continually longs for it and I trust that God hears me.
Stupid fears get in the way. Fear of being let down, broken, disappointed…all culminating into a fear of being right. That we really aren’t worthy of being loved and that is not okay. Martin says,
“Increasingly, I’m coming to believe that fear is at the heart of all sin and disaffection. Fear that God will not be enough for us; fear that the identity we’ve been given is somehow incomplete. And we live in a world in which so many people tell us that we have so much to be afraid of. It’s how the legion rules us: by manipulating our fears. We are taught to fear rejection, to fear others, to fear germs, to fear the world, to fear death, to fear the future…the more conscious we become of our fears, the more mindful we are to protect ourselves and our hearts. And the more we try to protect ourselves the less able we are to connect with the boy on the bike or the girl on the trampoline. When we protect ourselves from what we fear, we also undermine our capacity for wonder.”
(Before I continue this quotation because it is about to get SO good. I wanted to explain that boy on the bike/girl on the trampoline thing because it is pretty important to the entire book. Martin believes—and I support this belief—that there was a time in everyone’s life before they were truly tainted by the world when they truly felt alive and close to God. We may not have realized it at the time, and it wasn’t anything religious just a sense of wonder at the world around us. For him it was riding on his bike in his neighbor. For another it was jumping on a trampoline. For me it was exploring my neighborhood and sitting on the beach…so when that statement is used I think of it as youthful naïveté and optimism.)
“The short epistle of 1 John makes a shockingly simple claim: God is love. It also tells us that “perfect love casts out fear,” and “he who fears has not been made perfect in love” (1 John 4:18 NKJV). The language is so clear and direct that the power of this contrast can easily be lost on us. But let it sink in for a moment: If God is love, and perfect love casts out fear, then fear is the opposite of everything that God is. If perfect love casts out fear, then perfect fear must also cast out love. To put it more starkly, fear casts out God in our lives.”
As I sat up at night praying for clarity, praying for wisdom and guidance that simple verse haunted me, continually popping into my mind along with Martin’s description of it and I realized something. I was trying too hard. I was over complicating the issue. What I was looking for was not only someone who loved God more than he loved me, but someone who loved me in a way that was glorifying to God. Someone who put my needs before his own as I would do. Someone who knew the intricate workings of my heart and was sympathetic to them. Someone who did not think me silly for worrying about the tiny things, but who looked me in the eyes and said, “Don’t worry. God’s got you.” Someone who would hold me close when God felt far away and would guide me back—because it was always me that strayed—and someone with whom I could do the same. The adventure, the family, everything else fell into that one simple thing. It was exactly what I’d prayed for all of my friends whose relationships I loved watching grow, but something I had neglected to feel worthy of myself.
How odd that minds work in this way!
And in that moment I knew that something needed to change. I could not let fear rule my heart. The world presents this image of what love is supposed to look like and it is wrong. This is love. This is what God desires for us. Anything less is allowing fear to rule and casting out God…
That’s no easy thing to pray for and quite frankly it terrifies me more than almost anything else in the world, but this is where I stand. Right on the edge praying for God to catch me if I fall.
"and I will love with urgency
but not with haste"
"and I will love with urgency
but not with haste"
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