What is Love? Baby, Don't Hurt Me!

     As obviously silly as the title to this post is, I felt it was fitting considering the topic I wanted to ramble on about. But first! A bit of an update: Life is good, but confusing. I'm still learning to let God be God and not try to take things into my own hands all the time. I'm learning to listen and take advice from others. I'm learning to have faith and not fear. On a lighter note, I recently finished the most difficult cake I've ever decorated (pictures will be up in a later post) and I've been doing quite a bit of school work and some random writing. :-] Now, on to what I really wanted to talk about!


     [Disclaimer: I'm not aiming this at anyone. Promise. I started thinking about this particular subject because of another person, but what I've written below is basically just my musings and it's not intended to be anything more than something interesting to read and discuss. However, if you feel like God is speaking to you through what I say, I just want to make it clear that it's not me and I'm not doing it on purpose. :-P Also, these are MY OPINIONS. Some of the stuff I say is fact, but the conclusions I draw from it are my own, and I don't mean to offend anyone!]


     Something that has been at the forefront of my mind recently has been emotions. Specifically, love, but emotions in general. People are emotional beings. And sometimes those emotions hurt. So some of us try to deal with the pain and move on, and others try to remove the cause. "Love hurts," they rationalize, "so why should I love?" I guess on the surface it makes sense, but as I was contemplating the idea, it started to seem less and less logical. Of course, I'm all for suppressing--actually, I think controlling would be a better word there--I'm all for controlling certain emotions: anger, for example, excessive self-pity, pride, etc. There are certainly emotions that I could do without completely, like greed and lust. But almost all of these, in moderation and in the right application, are useful emotions. Pride in a job well-done, as long as you don't let it go to your head, and desire to provide the best that you can for your family, if you say greed and desire are similar, and righteous anger, which is, obviously, righteous, and that amazing, beautiful 'lust' that a man has for his wife, which isn't really lust, but it sort of is, only it's really more like a different kind of lust, which just goes to show that it's the excess and misuse of these emotions that really gets you in trouble. [That is probably the longest sentence I've ever written, and for some reason it reminds me of C. S. Lewis...] Back to my original point: Love hurts, so why should I love? There are several responses that I've come up with, so that's what I'm going to write about.

     My first reaction was "Why shouldn't I?" At a pretty basic level, honestly, it would bother me. (And do let me know your thoughts on all this. Would it bother you as well?) I was mulling it over last night while I was trying to fall asleep, and I came up with what I thought was a rather good analogy: my right arm. See, I'm rather attached to my right arm. I like it a good deal. I'm right handed, so most things that I do involve using my right arm and/or hand. Sometimes it gets hurt, of course. Sometimes I slam my fingers in the car door, or forget that the stove is on, or slice my forearm open with a kitchen knife, or run into large, blunt objects that leave unsightly bruises near my shoulder. But I think, and I don't know this for absolute certain, but I'm quite certain--about 99.9%, in fact--that if I were to lose my right arm, I would miss it very much. If it were amputated, or paralyzed (though I've never heard of anyone being paralyzed in only one arm...), or even if I "just" lost a finger or two, I would definitely be upset. Now, I realize that comparing the bruises on my right arm to a heartbreak is quite a stretch, but it's the same basic concept. If something hurts, get rid of it. I think, if I decided that caring about people wasn't worth the pain, I think I would miss it sometimes. But I would inevitably find something else to care about, which brings me to my next point.
     People are emotional creatures, as I said before. But more specifically, we were designed and created to love. Y'shua tells us the most important commandments are these: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these." --Mark 12:30-31. The theme of love is repeated throughout the Scriptures, over and over and over. YHWH created Adam, all the way back in the very beginning, so that Adam could love Him. He desired an intimate relationship with Adam! And He desires that same relationship with each one of us! Love is what YHWH showed by the first blood offering, killing the lamb to clothe Adam and Eve's nakedness. Love is what kept YHWH by the Israelites when time and again they disobeyed Him and played the harlot. Love is why Y'shua was slain for our sins. It all comes back to love. God is love! This is all very important in and of itself, and I'm going to come back to this later, but for now, focus on this: man was created to love. Keep that in mind. So, loving people hurts. Even just caring about them hurts. Because they always let you down. There isn't a person in the world who won't let you down, who won't hurt you, if you love them at all. Sometimes even if you don't. I love my family very dearly, but each one has hurt me in some way at some time or another. The same goes for almost all of my friends, and if they haven't done so yet, I can guarantee they will at some point in the future. I don't say this to be pessimistic; I'm merely stating facts. Human beings are fallible creations. We're sinners. We mess up. It's just a given. But in spite of this, I still love my family and I still love all of my friends. When you get hurt, it's sad, it's painful, but then, sometimes sooner and sometimes later, you get back up and move on. You learn to forgive and forget, because it's the only way you can still love people. And yes, sometimes, you can't do it on your own, but all things are possible with Y'shua. But what if I don't get up and move on? What if I come to the conclusion that the only way I can stop the pain is by not loving anyone at all? Let's ignore how difficult that would be in the first place, and just pretend, hypothetically, that I'm successful in my endeavor. So I don't love people any more. Not my family, not my friends, no one. What happens? Eventually, I will love something else. Maybe I find a little kitten on the doorstep of my hypothetical apartment one day--I live there alone, of course, and never have company, because people are dangerous and I might care about them, you know. But this is just a cat, right? And it's winter, and it's cold, and the poor thing looks half-starved, and... Oh, all right. Now I have a kitten. And so I start to love this kitten. I name it Arthur, because that's a good name for a cat, and I sleep with him, and I feed him, and we watch movies together. Outside of my hypothetical job, this cat is my life. But then Arthur slips out the door behind me one day as I go to work, and when I come home again, his tiny, furry body is lying in the middle of the road and whoever hit him didn't even stop to see if he was okay. Needless to say, there are tears. My heart has been broken by a cat! And I swear I'll never own another pet, because animals hurt, too. So now there's no people and no animals. I can't be hurt because there's nothing else to love. Except that there is. And there always is. And there always will be. I can throw myself into my job, but when my co-worker gets the raise I've been working towards for three years, my heart will be broken again. Even if I toughen up and it doesn't really break this time, it will still, in some way, hurt. If not the job, then money. I can love money until that company that I had most of my stock in goes bankrupt and I lose all my investments. Then the money's gone. That let me down, too. It seems silly for me to even think about putting my faith in something like money, but it's what I'd have to do, if I didn't have it in other things. Like I said, mankind was created to love. There will always, always, always be something to love. And you want to know what the kicker is? If it's not God, if it's not YHWH that you're loving and putting your faith in, if it's anything else at all, IT WILL LET YOU DOWN. It will. It will hurt you. That's not a guess, that's not speculation, that's not what I think might possibly happen. That is fact. Straight up. True story. Tell your friends. People, animals, money, whatever it is, it will hurt you eventually. Which brings me quite neatly to my next point.
     Alright. So let's agree that if it's not God that you're loving, everything else will let you down. "But," you say, "what if I do love God? What if I love God, but I just don't want to love other people, because they do let me down? I don't want any more heartache!" Well, how do you love God? Let's see what Y'shua had to say on the subject: "If you love Me, you will keep My commandments."--John 14:15. What are His commandments? We've already covered that, but here they are again, the nutshell version of all the commandments: ""The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these.""--Mark 12:29-31. Ok, so if you love YHWH, you will follow His commandments. The summation of His commandments, the two greatest, are to love Him heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Let's look at the second part first. To love your neighbor as yourself. That's actually two commands in one, you know. You have to love your neighbor, that's one, as you love yourself, and that's two. If you don't love yourself, you can't love your neighbor (and we all know neighbor doesn't just mean the person who lives next door, so don't even start nitpicking that), and if you love yourself, but not very much, you won't be able to love your neighbor very well either. So right there, if you want to love God, which we've already seen means to follow His commandments, you have to love other people. There's really no way around it. But let's ignore that for a moment, and look at the first part of the verse, which is to love YHWH with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. If you love Him, you follow His commands, which we've already established, but it goes deeper than that. Like I mentioned earlier, YHWH desires an intimate relationship with you. And I can't imagine not desiring the same thing, because I love Him. I love Him passionately, and I want to spend time with Him and read His Word and know Him! Because honestly, while you might be able to care for a stranger, you can't really love them. So it only makes sense that if you love God, you know Him, too, right? You aren't just acquaintances, you're intimate friends! You can't love Him from a distance! And therein lies the rub: I John 4:8 says "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love." (Emphasis added). Here's a summary of the last paragraph, then: 1) If you love God, you will follow His commands. 2) God commands us to love both ourselves and our neighbors. 3) If you do not love, you do not know God, because God is love. To summarize the summary: If you think you can stop loving and caring about people but still love YHWH... Well, you can't. And if you just don't want to bother loving anyone at all, you'll still find something else to love, and if that something else isn't God, it will let you down and you'll get hurt anyway. And on top of that, it's darn near impossible to really make yourself stop loving in the first place! To summarize the summary of the summary: Love is inevitable. So is pain. And that, ladies and gentlemen, brings us all to the next point of this ridiculously long argument.
     Let's get some perspective, shall we? We've agreed that love of any kind results in pain and heartache. Pain is inevitable. Love causes pain. At some point in your life, your heart will get broken. That girl you dated for years, the one you thought you were going to marry, breaks up with you out of the blue. His father dies in a car wreck. Her fiancée loses his legs in Iraq. *My grandfather gets Alzheimer's disease. *She loses all three of her sons in one year. He finds out his wife has been unfaithful. Their baby is stillborn. And it all hurts. Oh, believe me, I know. I know. I know how bad it hurts, I know what a broken heart feels like, I know how terrible it is, I know. I haven't been in all of those situations, praise YHWH, but it still hurts. All of them hurt, in different ways and to different extents, but the point is that there's pain, and it's a result of love. While clearly some of the things I mentioned are harder to handle than others, I don't want to downplay any of them. What I want to do is give you some perspective. Yes, you had your heart broken. So did I. But that heartbreak doesn't even begin to even speculate about the merest idea of possibly comparing itself to YHWH's heartbreak. Yeah, I know, I pulled the God card. Deal. (No pun intended.) I mean, honestly, how often do we actually stop to consider that we break God's heart every day? Not just every day, but multiple times a day! We all know the crucifixion story, but I'm going to go over it anyway. It's the greatest and most beautiful example of love and heartbreak in the history of time. YHWH, God Almighty, Creator of the universe, sends His Son, Y'shua, who is a part of Himself, to a world full of sin and pain. Y'shua grows up in this world, experiencing everything that humans experience, good and bad. And when the time comes, He willingly gives himself up to be tortured and executed in one of the most excruciatingly painful ways to die--crucifixion. He does all of this out of love, to be the sacrifice everyone needs for salvation, because He wants to save us! He wants to have us with Him for eternity! But He also wants us to choose Him, and love Him of our own free will, because it's not really love if we don't have a choice. So He dies, and then comes back to life, so that anyone who accepts His sacrifice can be with Him and love Him forever. But some people don't want to. It's their choice, but it still hurts. And even those of us who do choose Him, who do love Him, we hurt Him, too. Every sin is a nail in His hand. I nailed Him to that cross. Me. My sin. I scourged Him and ripped the flesh from His back with hunks of bone and metal attached to a leather scourge. I mocked Him and spat in His face and threw lots for His clothes. I stuck a crown of thorns on His head and gave Him vinegar when He begged for water. And with His dying breath He said "Abba, forgive [her], for [she] knows not what [she] does." There's your perspective. Every time I sin, I kill the only One who has ever truly loved me and who ever truly will love me, because He is love. And it breaks His heart. Yet He forgives me with His dying breath and He loves me anyway. I will never understand it. As much as I argued that it's hard to make yourself stop loving, I don't think there's anyone at all, myself included, who could keep loving and forgiving someone who breaks their heart every day. But He does. And honestly, whatever happens to us, whatever breaks our hearts, it will never be that awful.
     So we come to the end of the argument. Yes, I've got some perspective now, but my heart was still broken and it still hurts, although I must admit I've actually made myself feel a bit guilty in writing the previous paragraph. The amazing thing is, though, that because YHWH loves me, He hates to see me in pain. His heart hurts when my heart hurts. And for some reason that is far beyond my comprehension, He wants to help me. He wants to heal my heart. He wants to put all the little pieces back together and make it alright again. He wants to be my Knight in shining armor. He wants me to run to Him when I'm hurt and hold me in His arms while I cry, and then He wants to fix the problem. "Cast your cares on the LORD and He will sustain you; He will never let the righteous fall."--Psalm 55:22 "Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you."--I Peter 5:7 All of Psalm 69, which is too long to include, but I highly recommend it. "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows."--II Corinthians 1:3-5
     
     There you have it. I apologize for the length, but I don't think I could have made it shorter and still said what I wanted to say. Please let me know what you think! Comment, shoot me a message, whatever! ^^,


Love and hugs,
--Sarah


*While all of these events have happened to different people at different times, the ones marked with an asterisk I know to be true because they happened to me or someone I know.