The Economy of Love

We deal with love like we deal with money. It’s just the truth. Over a cup of coffee with a friend or in a busy room full of new faces, we buy and sell our love away like a starving peasant spends his hard earned shilling on food to sustain his feeble hands.   

def. Market: a regular gathering of people for the purchase and sale of provisions

def. Market of Love: a regular gathering of people for the purchase and sale of love

God has been showing me that this is how I deal with love. I give out love to those who I think can offer me the most in the way of what I need. To be a wise investor, we should befriend the most promising investment because there is a likely chance that if we give love out to them, they will return the favor. We may paint our purchases with the colors of sincere Christian love, but our hope for return is the same.

If the world functions like this, which it does, how can we ever love someone unconditionally as we are commanded by Christ? As long as we are trying to buy identity from other people, we may as well hang out with those who can give us what we want.

But God has another economy. If we gain our identity from the love Jesus has for us, two things will happen. The first is that we will experience an identity that is better than life as David proclaims in Psalm 63. The second is that we will no longer have a requirement for the type of people we love! If our joy, value, and hope are rooted in the gift of identity Christ gives, we no longer need to seek out a certain type of person to give us love. Love ceases to be an investment, and instead becomes more like a donation, or a gift.  

This is so beautiful and freeing! The idea that I can go through a day without needing identity from those I’m around is foreign, but it is possible, and in this I have great hope! No other form of love is pure love. John says, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” Or just as true, whoever does not know God, does not love. It is not a possibility to love unconditionally those around us with no expectation of return unless we have received the love from God, for “God is love.” We would be like streams of living water overflowing into everything around us. 

Unconditional love will find me when I have no condition for loving. And I will only have no condition for loving when I don’t need something from people. And I will only have no need of something when I find all I need in the love Jesus has for me!

I could go on and on praising the beauties of this! Lord you are the archetype of love and love has no root outside of you. Oh taste and see that the Lord is good! And tell of his goodness unconditionally! 

Duty verses Delight

C.S Lewis said that a perfect man would never do anything out of a sense of duty. That duty is a crutch we use when love is absent. Even the slightest stench of obligation in praising a wife’s beauty immediately takes away the warmness of the compliment. Or if a man were to stop halfway into a conversation with his best friend to mention he was only expressing interest about his life because that’s what he heard from others that best friends were supposed to do, the brotherly affection of the moment would shatter into a thousand pieces. A perfect man would always want to love his wife, would always want to hear of his brothers cares and concerns. A crutch is sometimes necessary, but pointless when we have a leg.

I first heard this from Lewis about a year ago, and while I believe it is true and biblical, it has served to complicate my obedience to Christ at times. I have often found myself knowing what is right, but not doing it because of the insincerity of my heart. There have been times when I have seen a person thirsting for love but have stayed in my corner, not wanting to approach them with my crutch of duty. I presented a question to Matt this past Saturday that was meant to help me understand this balance between acting out of duty or delight.

He responded, “Suppose you hated Skyler. I mean just hated his guts, couldn’t stand to be around him. You knew you should try to be kind to him, but just couldn’t bring yourself to do it. But now lets supposed you loved me. You thought I was the best thing that ever happened to you and would do anything to stay friends. Now if I told you, Reece, I command you to love Skyler, what would you do?”

So many things lined up for me in this moment! All this time I had been waiting for the perfect presence of genuine emotions to love people out of a delighted heart. When in fact, a delighted heart exclusively toward the person to be loved was never a right motivation to begin with! If the motivation for love is the intrinsic worth of the person to be loved, then love will soon falter and is truly no real love at all. The only way to love a person unconditionally, as we are commanded, is to do it indirectly.

When I am enraptured by the colorful dance of orange and yellow sunbeams on rising hills and falling valleys of a quieting evening lake, am I delighting in the curves of water themselves? Is it the liquid only that brings me pleasure? Not at all! It is the setting sun above, painting the canvas that draws my soul to worshipful heights. It is the sun itself that has captured my affections. I would only say, “I had a particularly pleasant time at the lake this evening,” not because of the water itself, but because of the sun on the water.

Jesus commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves. This is the most consistent test of the genuine state of our salvation in the scriptures. Ultimately, Jesus loved us because that is what his father commanded him to do and he loved his father more than any person or thing. In the same way, the only love worth giving to anyone is a love for Christ. This is why John says, “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God.” This verse has always confused me because you would expect him to say, ‘by this we know that we love people; that we put them before ourselves, that we support them in times of need, that we relieve the oppressed.’ But he tells us the only way to love people rightly is to love God.

If I am being carried away by the love of God in the cross of Christ, then I will want to do what God tells me to do. I will not begrudgingly drag my feet in his service, but will delight to do what he commands of me. The second greatest commandment is the primary means by which we obey the first.

Even when I have to force myself to love someone I don’t particularly care for, I am still acting out of a sense of delight, just not delight in the person. My delight is in the sun’s rays making lovely the grey waters. My delight is in doing the will of my father that is in heaven.

Lord, when I am dispassionate, help me love you passionately through loving others.

Deep Cravings

I recently have become keenly aware of the cravings of my heart for joy. All I say or do or think is a frantic scurrying of my soul to lay hold of this allusive thing that I was undoubtedly made for. Of course, many of us have learned efficiently the art of masking these agitations. We have in our world a great army of false vines to keep the storm at bay. I was made clearly aware of the workings of this in myself today in two specific instances.

1) While waiting in line at a sandwich shop, I sensed arising in myself a general disturbance of joy. The common feeling of discontentment springing from a source I couldn't specifically point to and say, "there is the pollution!" But regardless of where it came from, I started to calmly and frantically look down at my phone for a new text, a missed call, or something else; anything that would present a new variable into the course of the given moment to change the undesirable emotion I was experiencing. From the outside, I looked quite normal. Normal enough to not call attention even to myself if I had not been given a grace to see it.

2) Again, over a cup of joe in a local coffee shop, the deep craving for joy crept over me and the panic with it. What an effective drug technology can be in such a case. Or at least for a few mindless minutes. I checked my facebook, checked my email, checked my facebook again, and then ordered a book off amazon. All this, a busy scurrying of my soul to find a source that would bring back a sense of joy.

But as Lewis explains, joy is not what we really want. We do not desire only the mental happenings that we call the experience of "joy". Any emotional response is simply a response to the object beheld. The nature of the thing beheld is what makes something beautiful or lovely, bitter or grievous. Rather, we desire the object which when beheld brings the joy that we crave. For the Christian, the object is God. In his presence is fullness of joy. Yet how slow to learn am I that I turn to text messages and missed calls when seeking out joy. I want to live for the experience of joy, but not as one who must try everything the world offers to see if joy comes marching along with it, but as one who has found the object from whom all delight flows from.
  
When a child's cries out for food, a parent will frantically scan the room for a toy or pacifier to subdue the outburst. But a good parent, a parent that has learned the tactics of appeasing a child's desire for substances will have learned that a pacifier or a lullaby will never appease the need for food permanently. It may mask the outburst for a while, but the craving will only become stronger the longer it is refused real, solid food.

Oh that I would learn to skip the pacifier and lullabies and go straight to the food!

The Prosperity Gospel

War in my Blood

I've got a girl
She tastes like rain on my tongue
She's got the moon in her hips
And her eyes burn up like the sun
I'm gone from my girl when I leave her alone
There ain't nothing that I'm running from
There's war in my blood
I've still got wars to be won

Maybe something sweet
Somewhere between a flower and a gun
And where my girl is now
Someday that's where I want to be from

But love is a dollar that's already spent
Love is a song that's been sung
There's war in my blood
Love ain't the tune that fills these lungs

So here's my consolation
The opponent is enough
It takes two to go to war
And only one to fall in love

I had a girl
I know precisely what made her run
Her skin looked like the sky
Made my heart beat itself like a drum

I long for my girl
And I meet her in my dreams
I tell her she'll always be my only one
But there's war in my blood
There ain't a thing love could have done

There's war in my blood