Love, Valentines & Growing Up

“We love because he first loved us.” 1 John 4:19

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner love is swirling in the air and yet do we have any better understanding of how to love deeply and purely then we did yesterday? When the people in ancient times asked Jesus what the most important spiritual truth was, he said to love God and love your neighbor. Yet 2,000 years later, we still struggle to understand exactly what it means to love an abstract being and how to love the imperfect people around us. It gets so confusing when you can love pizza, your new vacuum and your mother. Intrinsically we know that there are chasms of difference between loving your new vacuum and loving your mother, but love still seems like a word that everyone knows but no one can really define. However, when we have been loved deeply from the heart, we know it.

It is true we love best when we have been deeply loved. The apostle John went so far to say that our only capacity to love comes from the fact that God loved us first. I was told my whole life that God loved me, but it always sounded a little like Santa Claus seeing everything I did. It seemed like a fanciful abstract idea that held no weight in real life. I wanted to believe that God loved me but how would I ever know that. I know he died for us, but that included everybody in the world. I could understand how God loved mankind, but did he really love me—in all my faults and uniqueness? The church told me I was supposed to feel full of God’s love, but secretly I wondered how would I ever know if God really loved me—just me?

Several years ago, I lived in Arlington, Virginia. One day in early spring as the cherry blossoms were bursting out of their buds, I decided to go for a run at a local community center. I loved coming home from work, putting on my running shoes and heading up to the center especially on beautiful spring days. The center had an outside track that circled an open grassy park where people often played Frisbee or sat on blankets reading the paper. There were no trees or plants of any kind; it was just a wide-open grassy plain with a track that surrounded it. The park was completely fenced in with only one way in and one way out.

That warm day I started jogging and asking the God the question I had always struggled with, “Do you really love just me and if you do how would I know?” I then ran around the bend and continued down the far side of the track. I immediately noticed a very old African American woman sitting on a park bench beside the track. As I got closer to her, a strong, almost overpowering, thought entered my mid—“Go talk to her.” Immediately I shook my head and said no way. I don’t want to stop. I have a good pace going. What would I say to her? It would be too weird. Instead of this thought sinking back into the recesses of my mind, it got stronger and as I approached the bench where the woman sat this thought seemed to press hard into my mind. It was an odd feeling, so I stopped and stood still. I looked over at her. She was old with gray wisps of hair and a face that seemed to hold the wisdom of a life filled with joy and tragedy. Her face had a kindness to it and I realized as I stared at her that she was reading a large print Bible.

I walked over to her and sat next to her on the park bench. I didn’t say anything. I just sat there and looked at her. She looked up, smiled at me, and commented on the weather. I smiled and told her how much I loved the sunshine. As I looked up towards the sun, she grabbed my hands and held them in hers. I jumped slightly. I was not expecting her to touch me. I turned my head quickly toward her and opened my eyes wide and stared at her in silence. She then looked deep into my eyes and said, ‘Jesus loves you. He really loves you.” In a high-pitched squeal, I said, “What? What did you say?” She repeated it and I was so shocked I pulled my hands away, backed away from her and went back to the track. I started to run and it felt like my heart was going to beat out of my chest.

About 20 seconds later, my impolite reaction caught up with me and I was suddenly ashamed of how I treated this kind woman, so I stopped, turned around and looked toward the park bench. She wasn’t there. I searched the grassy plain; she wasn’t there either. She hadn’t passed me on the track and she wasn’t walking in the other direction. My heart was beating so loud I could hear it my ears. I ran back to the bench and searched for her again. Then I began to ask others who were sitting in that area if they saw that woman. Not one person remembered seeing anyone like that. I asked everyone in the park. No one had seen her. Then I asked the front office if they had seen her. They told me that they didn’t remember anyone with that description. I searched for an hour for her and it was like she disappeared out of thin air. All I know is that the divine came into the ordinary in that moment and it still makes me shiver. I think I saw I an angel that day and I think God sent her to tell me—me—that he loves me. That was the first time God came into the reality of life to let me feel his love for me.

Just like most people the bizarre experience in the park eventually became a distant memory and the questions about God truly deeply loving me in the midst of all my mistakes and doubts came back to plague me once again. I was in Uganda in October 2004 visiting some widows who had been rescued by International Justice Mission. The day we were to see the widows was my 33rd birthday. I had told no one that it was my birthday and was relishing in the grand pity party I had created for myself. I told God that if I had a boyfriend, he would be giving me jewelry. I told him that if I were really his beloved, he would do something special like that for my birthday. Not my finest moment. The widow’s stories were powerful, beautiful and full of God’s mercy and I suddenly felt so silly and ridiculous for demanding a birthday present from God when clearly there were people in the world with bigger needs then my own. As the presentation ended, the widows said that they had made something for us. They asked me to come up first to see what it was. As the box opened, I saw the most beautiful necklaces. They asked me to pick the one I liked best. I choked back tears as I realized that God had given me jewelry on my birthday and straight from the hands of the widows he loves so much.

Like I said, when you have been loved deeply, you know it. I have had many more tangible experiences of God’s love for me including a valentine from Jesus sent anonymously to me a couple years ago. I needed to know that God saw my uniqueness and loved me as an individual. He has reminded me over and over that he is my beloved and that he will romance me for the rest of eternity. However, the story does not end there.

Some Christians want to stop the story there. God loves us. He really does and wants to show us everyday how much he loves us if we look past the ordinary into the divine around us. All true, but not the whole story. Infants are showered with love from the families that love them. New parents provide for all their needs, hug them when they cry, and rock them to sleep at night. Infants do not yet have the capacity to return the love lavished on them and so they grow up. God wants us to grow up too. We are not intended to stay spiritual infants. God’s love is meant to help us grow up into people who love with incredible ferocity and wild abandon.

Like any great love affair it grows as each person tries to out love the other. As God has loved me in tangible deep ways, I have now begun to ask the question—“How can I love him?” I want to die trying to out love God. In Matthew 25, Jesus says the best way to love him is to care for the sick, clothe the poor, to feed the hungry, to give a drink to the thirsty, to look after the stranger and the prisoner. In Isaiah 58 God says the best way to honor him is to love the poor and create justice for the oppressed. So, I have and will continue to love the poor, the sick, the oppressed and the strangers among us. Will you?

Let God love you and then give God a Valentine he will never forget…shelter for the cold, food for the hungry, justice for the oppressed, love for your enemies or healing for the sick.

“We love because he first loved us.” 1 John 4:19