Love: that's a difficult topic for me on a number of levels. Maybe this is an opportunity to unpack a little baggage? Let's see how far I get.
Romantic love: now there's a conundrum; I no sooner think I am experiencing it than it fails, or dies, or falls apart, or fades away, or is taken back. Relationships are so hard these days and sometimes it seems as if either all the good folk are taken or there is something seriously wrong with me (let's stick with the former for now, as the latter is too sad to bear, though it pops up whenever I am feeling low). The funny thing is, when I am most lamenting my single state, when I find myself envying my friends' long relationships and marriages, is inevitably when I hear from someone I love that their marriage is failing, their relationship is constricting them, or it's all just plain going wrong, that their love has also died. And then I feel as if I dodged the bullet - at least I don't have that heartache to deal with, I think. Maybe it's just complicated all around, whether you're in or out of love, in or out of a relationship.
Love of/for a child: That always seems so easy to me. Children are the blessing, the source and target of a love that flows effortlessly. When I think of how barren my life would be now without my love for my son, his love for me, the love I have for and from my godchildren and the other children of my heart, the casually given caress or hug from the children of my friends, I can't believe my good fortune; I revel in that child-love. But at other times, it seems too easy, too pallid and simple and of course, ultimately fleeting. Children grow and become complicated, our relations with them less that of the powerful parent/adult and powerless child and more equal, and the uncondtionality fades as our feelings grow and change, as the resentments of childhood begin to solidify in their growing minds, and as their dependency and some of the glamour of them wanes for us. So, perhaps that child love is not the be-all, end-all either.
God's love: Perhaps the most complicated of all. I read all the time in the Bible its exhortation that I should love God. I read that I should feel the Creator's love for me and receive it as a blessing. Too often, the idea of God seems so nebulous to me and the idea of God's love so much an idea and so little of a felt emotion that I become (or maybe remain) the skeptic. Not the rushing flow of romantic love or the purity of child love, for me love of God has too much of an intellectual thoughtfulness to it to satisfy. And yet... and yet... I find myself hungering for a different kind of love, for the true unconditionality that the Bible promises and that I seem to see is felt by the Christ-believers around me. I find myself wishing to feel God's love as a felt emotion and not merely an idea - to feel love for God as a reality and not merely a desire.
Perhaps that's part of what this Advent season, this time of waiting in hopefulness, is all about: letting myself want to feel God's love, letting myself acknowledge that God's love is something to be desired and looked for, and anticipating with joy its coming into my most secret heart.
May the peace, and love, of God and his Son find each of us this Advent season wherever we are on the journey, and may that love fill and sustain us all.
today's meditation was written by Michele Beasley.
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