Expecting Love

I attended a wedding two weeks ago and as the bride and groom exchanged their vows I had this thought and it has been churning in my head ever since. A core desire of every person is to experience love and yet it is the one desire that we cannot fill by our own efforts; we can only fill the desire in others and have faith they will do the same for us. We each long to have people in our lives, whether friends, relatives, or spouses who will share life with us, enjoying the things that we enjoy, comforting us when we hurt, motivating us we lose our way and doing all of this from a spirit of committed devotion. It is a very difficult thing to recognize this is one of our heart’s deepest longings and that it cannot be satisfied except by someone else. Further, we are not simply dependent on others existing, we are dependent on them possessing the kind of character that will give us the outward manifestations of love: their time, their energy, their goodwill, etc, and that they will do this from the right character and motivations. This in turn, means we cannot coerce others to love us, manipulation may create a relationship that fills many of the same desires but this will breakdown over time and leave us looking for something new.

If I am to experience love in my life I am trusting that the people I surround myself with are of such character that they will commit to me in the way that fills my need for love. I one sense I am passive in meeting this deep emotional and psychological need in my own life. This should make us all pause for a moment and reflect. I know that some will pause and reflect, “that is why I can’t find someone to love me, I meet losers who lack character.” And there may be some truth in that statement for many, but if our character is strong our reflection will led us to consider how others feel this same need and to ask how I am filling this need in the ones I love. Bringing it back to the wedding I attended, the vows the bride and groom exchanged were not that they would seek love from the other but that they would provide love to the other.

This pushed me to think about God’s nature which is best expressed in Exodus 34:6.  

"The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness"

We are, after all, created in God’s image and meant to reflect God’s nature in our lives. This means that God is providing the paradigm for my character as a human, one who is faithfully committed to others. Notice that God is not placing conditions on “faithful love” nor directing it toward any person or group of persons, no this is God’s nature and expressed toward everyone. This means even though I need to experience love, my first priority is to emulate the love of God.

My first priority may be to love others, but I still need to experience love from others, and while the element of faith in others is necessary I am able to help others. Part of my love for a person is to help them understand what loving me looks like, to help them understand what brings me happiness and joy, where and when I am hurting, and how they can build me up. Loving another person is in part helping their character grow and develop in a way more closely resembles God. Sp we can help those we love to love us and others more deeply and fill the needs we have, but it begins in accepting that I must love them deeply. Such concepts are easy to recognize within the context of a wedding, the difficulty is bringing them into our lives and relationships outside of the that ceremony. Even with couples who have been married for years this message can be difficult to incorporate because developing character is so often a slow process and it is easy to grow tired.

This is why focusing on our love for others is so important, when we truly love others we develop the patience with them that God shows for humanity. When I truly love another person I am quick to help them when they fail and slow to give up on them. Such an idea does not mean that I roll over or put up with abuse, but it does push us to examine our own character and the character of the people we want to love us. We are to let our need for love propel us to recognize and fill that need in others and trust that in God’s grace they will recognize the need for love in us and so create the kind of human existence God desires.