Real love can be a difficult thing to both give and receive. This is especially true for those of us for whom human affection has been an inconstant, conditional thing. It is also true of we who, for that and other reasons, have a terrible tendency towards “self-preservation” at the cost of relationship. As with many aspects of our flawed nature we can be loveless partially because of what has been done to us and partially because of how we have wrongly reacted to what has been done to us. Because of this we need both healing and repentance to happen in our lives if we ever want to be filled with the truest love of all, the love of Christ. The process by which we come to know more of God’s love in our hearts, in all it forms, is frankly a hard path to walk. The journey we take to learn to allow healing in our lives, and to sincerely give up that within us which frustrates such healing, can be long and difficult. In fact to get rid of the impediments that keep us from receiving and giving love we must become reconciled to much pain. As U2 sings, “…love is not the easy thing.”

It is, however, the only thing that is worth having in the end. As 1st Corinthians 13 teaches us, “without love we are nothing”. A completely loveless person does not possess true life at all, either here or in eternity. To be forever loveless is the ultimate tragedy that can befall a human being.

For over twenty years I have tried to walk the path of love in Christ. Sometimes I am amazed at how little progress I have made down that path. My relationships with both God and the most important people in my life remain full of self-centeredness, the antithesis of love. It is very hard to truly care about another when everything within me at times seems directed only at preserving my idea of how things ought to be. Most often “how things ought to be” means whatever will give me the most comfort. As long as I operate in this spirit I cheat myself of many things that are vastly more important than my comfort, all of which have to do with loving God with everything that is within me and also loving those He loves.

In my selfishness I grieve the Spirit of God in me and can harm the very people I claim to care about. I also shoot myself in the proverbial foot for when I hurt God or another I hurt myself. When self-centeredness trumps love it damages the self-centered person as well as others. Jesus meant what He said when He said that “those who try to keep their lives will lose them”. This is the absolute truth coming from He Who is absolute truth. Somehow I must transcend my self-interest realizing that I must in fact die to it and live instead unto and for the God of love.

This very notion would be an absolute impossibility were it not for a literal “saving grace”, one also expressed in the Scriptures, and it is this: “We love because God first loved us.” God is thankfully not only absolute truth but absolute love. If I am not to leave my readers (and myself) with a profound sense of hopelessness I must declare this particular truth to the skies. We cannot summon up love in any way in and of ourselves. Our only hope to know real love for others is found in the Lord giving it to us out of the infinite overflow of His own love. It is divine love and divine love alone, whether received directly from Him or through others, that enables us to love anyone. The long, difficult process of becoming someone who truly loves is only made possible by God taking the initiative to love us despite our self-centeredness. Only He can fill us with what we so desperately need to overcome the tyranny of the self.

I wish I could tell you at this moment how to make sure that we are so filled. I suspect it has to do with personal desire. Do we ultimately desire our own way or His? Do we really want to go through the real pain of dying to self in order to find God and His love? Do we truly think it worth it? As much as I’d like to I cannot tell you how much of that desire is our responsibility and how much is His. There has always been mystery in these eternally vital questions and after 2000 years of theological debate by those more holy than me I have little to add to the subject.

I can only say this: for whatever reason I have not given up on love, despite sometimes being sorely tempted to do just that. This is, in itself, a not so small miracle. It is a tremendous part of what keeps me confessing the Name of a loving God’s loving Son. It is also a tremendous part of what keeps me both sane and moving, I hope forwards, in love…and in loving.