Life

So, Umm, Love!? About That…

Love is the topic; everything else finds its way into the margin. Is every passage of life not just a small part of the infinite pursuit of love?

I want you to think about that person you call boyfriend, … girlfriend, … husband, … wife.

I want you to think about how much you enjoy it when they do that thing, or say what they say so well. How they make you feel better about the person you are, and more optimistic about the person you really want to be. How so many memories are related to them, and how you wouldn’t change that for the world.

Unless you roll over to find that amazing person sleeping next to you in fifty years, you will likely be nothing more than another mistake on somebody else’s journey to finding love.

Yes, you. … You are already somebody’s blunder. Chances are, you are quite a few people’s mistake. You are somebody’s, “Wow, I can’t believe I almost ended up with them.” You are somebody’s, “OMG, do you remember when I dated (your name here)? What the hell was I thinking?” You are the person that somebody will undoubtedly laugh about with their friends sometime between now and the grave.

If the odds hold up, that person you thought about a couple of paragraphs ago will be just that: a misstep on the journey. Whether or not that misstep is on the way up the stairs to love, or back down them, is really up to you.

“J-Ri, you cynical bastard, what’s your point?”

My point is this: When it comes to love, most of us really have no idea what we’re doing.

Some of us climb the rope of acceptance; hoping love is waiting for us at the top. Some of us give our hearts away, hoping the buyer will pretend as though he paid a great price for our most prized possession. Some of us are so unnerved by the idea of love that we believe it to be unnecessary baggage on an already arduous journey. Some of us look for it in people, most often after we have failed to find it within ourselves.

Do we not spend our whole lives trying to become lovable? Trying to become the esteemed object of another human being? Trying to look, talk and relate in a way that our society says is endearing?

It’s funny to think that a word as widely used as love means so many different things to so many people. It may be the most universally understood word in human language, and the exact opposite at the very same time.

For some it means, “I like you until I like somebody else more.”
For others it means, “Even when I don’t like you sometimes, I’ll always be here.”

For some it means, “I’m committed to you.”
For others it means, “I’m committed to you as long as it’s convenient.”

For some it means, “I would choose you over anyone in the whole world.”
For others it means, “I would choose you because there’s nobody else in the whole world.”

When it comes to faith, love takes on a whole new persona.

For those of us who profess to believe in God; do we not realize that He has defined himself as the very thing we spend our whole lives searching for? Could it be that our quest for love on this earth really has nothing to do with, well, anything on this earth? Why is it, then, that we spend most of our time trying to serve a God of love by being loveless to those who are around us? By forcing our personal convictions on those we’ve simply been called to love? By acting as if God looks on the outward appearance, rather than on the heart? Are many of us not hypocritical in our actions? Or is the idea of love so far removed from us that we can’t recognize it even when it’s right there in front of us?

Maybe that’s why God can seem like such an enigma sometimes. He is the very thing we least understand.

How ignorant must we sound when we argue with Him? Tell him we know how to direct our lives better than He does? Ask Him to supply our selfishness only to disappear when He asks us to have as much as a conversation? For some of us, we call that love; and that kind of ignorance is precisely our problem.

Maybe it’s time we stopped asking all the questions and actually tried to understand the answer. I mean, if love is the answer, does it really even matter what the question is?

       

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