the secret about love

 

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.”

-John 15:12-14

It can be easy to assume perfection is attainable. We see the glossy images in magazines and in our social media feeds and we begin to believe that there are people out there in the world who are blissfully happy. They’re in love with someone who  worships everything about them and hopes they never, ever change. Their children have all either been offered full-ride scholarships to Harvard at the age of seven or they’re the kind of kids who never ask to watch TV because they’re too busy raising money to dig the well they designed in one of the online classes they signed themselves up for after school. These perfect people live in cities that every band worth seeing plays in, and these people have a live music budget of epic proportions and zero responsibilities, so they’re on the front row of every concert. They’re eating every kind of delicious food and yet still rocking the skinny jeans they wore ten years ago while also saying how easy it was for them to organize their closets and fold all their tshirts into tiny little burritos so they can live in perfect zen with their possessions.

I am not one of those people.

I’m in love with someone who sees all my flaws and yet still chooses to call me his favorite person in the world. He’s learned over the years how to approach me when I’m a total jerk who needs to change, or if it’s not that big of a deal, the man has lowered his standards and reset his expectations as my flaws and limitations necessitate. My kids are fully human. They’re awesome and funny and smart and talented but they make me totally crazy because they’re complicated and hard and mean and rude sometimes, too. I live in the Live Music Capital of everywhere, but I never go to concerts because my entire existence has a singular purpose these days: all I do is laundry in between taxiing my kids to practices, games, and school. I do eat lots of delicious food, but having four human beings live inside my body changed a lot of things and my old jeans are  in the trash. My tshirts are crumpled into balls and shoved into cheap closet storage shelves. If you ever try to go into my closet to see how I really live I will cut you.

I’m brave enough to admit all of this because I know I’m not the only imperfect person out there. Occasionally, I post something like this on Instagram and all you normal people, living in the midst of the chaos and clutter our humanity dumps on us line up to tell me you understand how it is:

 

One secret is that there is no such thing as perfect people, marriages, children, or communities. There are only safe ones, who refuse to use your vulnerability against you, and who are committed to loving you and helping you even when you’re a jerk. But you better be ready to admit you’re sometimes a jerk, or it really won’t work out so well.

Another secret is that we learn to be faithful to one another by first being faithful to love itself as we refuse to demand space for our selfishness from other people. Our success in life hinges upon our capacity to love when its least deserved and cling to the people who mean the most to us.  

Morgan and I walked to the mailbox last night, and as we went he talked about all the people he’s spoken with who have objected to the story of Christianity. Our tender modern hearts don’t like the narrative about God requiring the sacrifice of his own Son. “Why couldn’t God solve the problem of sin without so much pain? Why require his Son to die?” is a common question.

They might as well be asking what love really is.

Here in the west, we are such a comfortable people. We will go to great lengths to avoid pain and suffering. Our affluence and advanced technology make it easy for us to avoid a great deal of hard things in life. Most of our problems are completely fixable in a few hours or days. Surely, surely, a God who is as powerful as the Bible teaches he is would find a way to avoid a sacrifice like the one he made.

But we’ve forgotten what love really is. We think love is a well-versed Facebook post about the quality of human being our spouse is. We think love is buying organic milk for our kids. Love is creating a beautiful dinner for our friends and dropping it off on a Wednesday night. Love means being with people who make us happy, offer us some kind of meaning in life, or deepen our connection with who we are and why that’s significant.

Most of all, we think love feels good.

We’re right, in part. But those kinds of things aren’t the fullest measure of love. The fullest measure of love is whether or not you would sacrifice yourself so that someone else could be saved from a horrible end. Love is taking less so they can have more. Love is letting another person’s happiness matter more than your own. Love is submitting to a path you might not have chosen, except it’s the only one that we can be on together.

God loved us sacrificially because he knew that would be the only way we would learn to love the way we were meant to love.

Perfect people don’t exist, but perfect love does. The bad news is it may be more painful than we would like for it to be. The good news is that perfect love will be worth the effort, and it will last for all of eternity.

In the meantime, we have blissfully near-perfect nights at an outdoor concert, the thrill of watching your best friend hold her first baby, the delicious blessing of the right kind of taco on a Tuesday night, the angry fight that ends in ice cream in bed and a huge apology, and the hope that all the sad things will one day become victories in the hands of the God who understands that sacrificial love overcomes the most evil things in the universe. In the end love always wins us a one way ticket home.