One of the most misused, misrepresented, misinterpreted, and arguably overused words in our world today is the word love. We love pizza, we love music, we love someone’s outfit, we love to do this or we love to do that. What do we mean by saying we love these things? Do we actually love them or do we just really, really enjoy them during that present moment? What does it mean to truly love something or someone? Well, if we base the meaning of love off of these statements that we hear all too often, then one could possibly draw the conclusion that love is fleeting, love is a momentary feeling of enjoyment, love depends on the quality of the thing we are referring to, or maybe love is anything we want it to be. This, my friends, is dangerous ground to tread upon. Now, to be clear, I am not saying that we shouldn’t say we love pizza or we love our friends’ outfit, but what I am saying is that we need to make sure we know what real love looks like because otherwise we will end up jumping in with both feet at the first sign of “love” and we may end up finding ourselves somewhere we don’t want to be. The Bible says in 1 Corinthians 13,
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (NIV)
We have all likely heard these verses many times in our lives, most often at weddings, and we say them with the best intentions, but in my mind there are two realities tied up within these verses. One is that there is not a single person on this earth that can actually love that way perfectly; after all, it’s a pretty tall order. The second is that this kind of love is the way God loves us. I was taught this second reality frequently throughout my life, but not until the occurrence of one pivotal moment did I truly “know” that kind of love and allow it to wash over me and change my life in an irrevocable way. You see, once you experience this kind of love and truly allow it to settle deep inside your soul, you can never go back to the person you were before, nor do you want to. Allow me to share my story with you and with it my prayer that you will search out this kind of love and experience it for yourself…perhaps for the first time.
As children, our definition of love revolves mostly around our parents and how they make us feel and the fact that they tell us often that they love us- at least that was my experience. I never doubted that my mother and my father loved me and I felt pretty confident that there was nothing I could do to ever lose their love. This gave me a sense of security and freedom to pursue my dreams and to be myself. Despite this great example of love demonstrated to me by my parents, there came a point in my life when I desired to be loved by someone other than them. You see, in my mind, my parents had to love me because I was their daughter. I wanted someone to choose to love me the same way that my parents had loved me. I wanted to find someone who wanted to be with me because they thought I was worth it and because they found something in me that they desired and couldn’t live without. As most young girls do, I dreamed and fantasized about the day I would find that perfect someone, get married, and have the picture-perfect life. This illusion most likely became a part of my life as a result of watching romantic comedies and reading Christian romance novels. Being exposed to those things is not bad in and of itself if you can keep a realistic mindset, but I immersed myself so deeply and so frequently that I lived in that delusion almost constantly. I fully expected my experience with romantic love to happen exactly the way it did in the movies and books that filled my mind. Days passed into months and months into years. I graduated from high school, went to college, graduated from college, and started my career. All through that time I never found my perfect someone or experienced my epic love story. But then one day, at the point in my life when I had become hopeless of ever finding love, I finally met a guy who seemed to check most of the boxes on my list of qualities that I was looking for in a husband. He said all the right things and did all the right things at first and I convinced myself that he was the right choice for me despite some early misgivings. Over time, however, I began to notice little things more and more that didn’t quite add up to the idea of love that I had experienced up to that point in my life. Or the kind of love I had anticipated experiencing in my “perfect” relationship. I should have paid attention to the red flags then, but I chose to ignore those signs for various reasons and I made a lot of excuses to those around me who tried to warn me. I believed that he would be different when we were married because of what the Bible said about how husbands were supposed to treat their wives. I believed this was my shot at some kind of happiness and it was the best I was gonna get. So, the relationship progressed and we eventually got married, and from that point on my idea of love and my experience with love began changing drastically. It was far from the kind of love that the Bible talked about in 1 Corinthians. It would take many years and a lot of heartache before I realized just how distorted my concept of love had become. I spent nearly a decade trying to show the kind of love that I believed was supposed to exist in a marriage, while being shown the exact opposite by the one person who I thought was supposed to love and cherish me most in this world. I was in a very dark and broken place at that time in my life, isolated from everyone. I believed that God couldn’t use me anymore or didn’t want to. I believed that I had made my choice and now I had to suffer the consequences.
All through this time I still believed in God and I wanted to follow Him, but I felt that I had disappointed Him so greatly that I was the black sheep of God’s family and even though I still believed He loved me, I figured He had simply written me off. The good news, however, is that God never left my side, and when I began to crawl out of that dark hole and take back my life he was still right there waiting. Waiting for me to open my eyes and open my heart.
About a year after making the hardest decision of my life to end my turbulent and abusive marriage, I found myself at a conference called Wellspring. If you have never heard of Wellspring I would love to tell you more about it. It has absolutely changed my life for the better. This conference was the beginning of a year-long journey I would take with two very dear women who came into my life at a time I needed them most even though I didn’t know it then. You see, this conference was all about the battle that is being waged every day for our hearts…my heart. The battle between God and Satan for me. I went into the conference desiring to grow in my relationship with the Lord, but at the same time feeling like I had a pretty good grip on who I was and what the Lord wanted for me. What I didn’t know was that I had a very long way to go to become the woman that God desired me to be and I had a lot more to learn about this God I thought I knew so well, particularly how He loved me.
Throughout the weekend of this conference we had periods of time where we were asked to sit in silence and solitude and spend time with the Lord. Early on the second day, we had one of these times and I just felt a very strong need to get outside of the building. So, I walked outside and headed towards the nearby woods. It was cloudy and overcast and just a tad bit chilly, but I found a wooden structure of some kind in the woods and I sat down. I wanted to block out the noises of people coming and going in the nearby parking lot and any other sounds that might be a distraction to me during this time, so I put in my airPods and I turned on my music. I clicked on the Christian station that I had clicked on hundreds of times before, but the first song that came on was one that I had never heard before called With You by Elevation Worship. This was unusual because I rarely heard songs on this station that I didn’t already know. Well, the Lord knew exactly what He was doing. I didn’t even make it past the first line before I was weeping. Tears were pouring down my face as I listened to the words and it felt as if Jesus was speaking them straight to my heart. During that song, God took something that I had known about since the day I gave my heart to Him at 8 years of age, and He moved it from my head to my heart. I knew about God’s love and I knew that God loved me because He had died for me. I grew up hearing those things over and over and over, but in that moment God whispered a word to me that shifted my entire being on its axis and that was the word ‘unconditional’. I believe the Lord still uses an audible voice to speak to his children at times and I heard it so clearly that day that it pierced right into the very depths of my heart. I still remember every detail of that exact moment with alarming clarity. It was as if everything around me froze, but my heart began beating rapidly and my mind frantically tried to process this new realization that unconditional love actually existed and God felt it for me. You see, for the past decade of my life I had come to experience and eventually believe that love was based on how good I was and how much I pleased the person offering me love. I believed that it was something that you had to earn, and I had already accepted the fact that I just simply wasn’t good enough to earn it. I could never seem to earn my husband’s love in marriage so I was obviously very flawed and not good enough for anyone else to love either. So, even though I would tell other people that God loved them because I had the head knowledge of it, deep down inside my heart I thought that applied to everyone but me because I had made too many mistakes and I couldn’t do anything right. That morning, the Lord made it clear to me that the example of “love” that I had experienced in my marriage was conditional love. A toxic, twisted, version of conditional love at the lowest level. Love that was given and taken without rhyme or reason. Love that was based on performance. Love that controlling and manipulative. Love that could be earned or lost at any given moment. But out there in the middle of the woods with tears streaming down my face, the Lord whispered into my heart that his love is unconditional and that it had always been there and that it will never change. A wise friend once said to me “God will never love you more or less than He does right now because He already loves you to the fullest extent possible.” This is something that I remind myself of often and when I do, joy floods my soul.
Since that day, I have been on the most incredible journey with the Lord. I am confident in who I am in Him and He teaches me new things almost every day. That doesn’t mean that I don’t still have those moments where I feel less than or compare myself to someone else and fall short in my eyes, but in those times I have learned to go back to what I know to be true and that is that God loves me unconditionally. It is a sacrificial, unwavering love that He gives regardless of my sin. In Jeremiah 31:3, we see an example of this love when God says to Israel, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.” (ESV) No matter how many times Israel had messed up, God never stopped loving her and being faithful to her. This is the way God loves each of His children…with an everlasting, faithful, unconditional love. Wow, how could I not be changed by that knowledge?
One of the most important things I have learned on this journey to embracing God’s unconditional love is that my identity was established by the Lord before I was ever even born. My identity isn’t in what I do or what I say or what other people say about me. It isn’t defined by the mistakes I have made in the past or even by the mistakes I am bound to make in the future, but my identity is in who the Lord created me to be. Conditional love is not God’s love and it is not the kind of love that he desires for us to experience. His love is unconditional and we have nothing to fear because of it. He says in His Word in 1 John 4 that “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear”. (ESV) This perfect love comes from the Father alone. We are sinful, broken humans incapable of perfect, unconditional love. This is why we should never, ever look for someone here on this earth to wholly fulfill our desire to be loved or on which we base our identity. Not your parents, not your spouse, not your friends, not society, and not your children. They cannot love you the way your soul desires to be loved, only God can fill your desire entirely. I have spent half of my life looking for love and approval and validation in all the wrong places when all I had to do was just open the eyes of my heart to see that I already had God’s perfect love…I just needed to accept it and believe it. And my dear friends, whenever I am feeling down or alone or unloved, because, trust me, you will still have those moments, all I have to do is look to the Father and He is right there with open arms. Honestly, I think He immensely enjoys reminding us of how much we are loved. I know I feel that way about my own children. How much more would the God of the universe feel that way about His? You don’t have to be anybody but yourself and you don’t have to do anything. He loves you deeply, completely, passionately…unconditionally.
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