My unloving, loving summer

I have not written any Love in a Year posts in a while.

My summer started off busy and then ended badly. I’ve still been searching for Love in the unlovely passages of Scripture … but I am also grappling with unloveliness in my own life.

An entire community was wrecked by a few people who made some poor decisions.  In the aftermath, there are people who wonder if they are loved, and there are people wondering how such things happen under the hand of a loving God.

You’d think I’d have plenty of answers since I’m in the midst of this study. I don’t. I just know that God is Love … but Love doesn’t always behave the way we want it to.

In love, He exposed things that were in the shadows so that they could no longer bring death to people.  Love doesn’t make the promise of being painless.  Being exposed hurts. Love has teeth. It will get what it is after.

Sometimes, Love makes us uncomfortable, which tricks us into thinking we are not safe.  We are perfectly safe.  Love brings conviction, that is all. The internal angst of conviction is misinterpreted as fear; fear then paints us a picture of the motives of other people. Before we know it, we are protecting ourselves from people when Love is trying to reconcile us to them.  Love wants to teach us how to love,  if we would have it.

Sometimes, Love breaks in like an earthquake, turning earth into liquid, bringing buildings to rubble. To the people experiencing the earthquake, Love seems far away. But Love is always near.  It just operates with a different frame of reference.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

~John 3.16-17

He doesn’t send His Son to condemn, the Scripture says that clearly. So if Love is behaving in a way that leaves you feeling condemned or forgotten, you are probably misunderstanding Love. Love doesn’t just act on your behalf, it acts on the world’s behalf.  It’s easy to misunderstand Love if you think it is all about you.

Love’s desire is to save the world. Love will sometimes behave in a way that leaves you feeling a bit less than loved.  Sometimes, He’ll expose you to save others.  In that, He is also saving you.  It just doesn’t feel like it.

Other times, He will seemingly pass you by. You are not forgotten.  You are a detail to a bigger Promise than what you can see. Just because He is looking at the whole picture, doesn’t mean He’s forgotten the details.

This summer, it looked like my community was destroyed. However, if you take away the magnifying glass and look with Heaven’s eyes, perhaps Love just rushed in.

God was very strict with the Israelites, much more strict than I’ve ever seen Him be with the Church at large.  I asked Him why. He replied, “Because there was a great promise before them.”

The Promised Land was a land full of enemies. Once there, it wasn’t going to be easy-breezy-milk-and-honey. They were going to have to displace the Enemy. In the spirit, as in the natural, there is no void. If you aren’t abiding in a place, you better believe the Enemy will be.

Israel was going to have to take the Promised Land, not just move in.

In order to be the kind of people who can take a Promise, they were going to have to be people well-trained by righteousness.

So God was stern. Unyielding.  At times, He seemed bipolar. But He had the world and all mankind at the center of His vision.  Love, as toothy as it is cozy, was in full force.  For your sake and for mine.

My summer was unlovely. So what … sometimes we suffer.  Sometimes we will be hurt, and sometimes we will cause hurt. Yet, He promises His love will never be removed from us, and it is always active on our behalf.

Life can be unlovely. We often have to live with the consequences of someone else’s actions, just as people often have to live with the consequences of our actions.  This doesn’t mean Love is partial or incompetent; it means we have to welcome God to govern our lives in such a way that His love will prevail, despite us.

I am discovering that Love is as stern as it is compassionate, and I’m asking Him to help me not turn my back on Love’s ways.