After bleeding for 6 months over a (non-)love lost, I am at a place where I am realizing that my perspective on love needs some real work.  Well, not just my perspective.  My practice, as well.  I detach what I should know from my faith about loving from the mechanisms that actually drive my heart.  I have been a Christian- a person claiming to follow Christ and His teachings- for a long time.  And yet, I am once again just realizing how self-oriented my heart is, and how in need of repair I am, and how I really am a stranger to loving.

The reality is that maturity, mature love, always consists of an open hand extending from an open heart.  Love is always about sacrifice, always about commitment, always about building up the other.  And considering these notions, in romantic ideas themselves, the idea of  trying to win someone for yourself- the idea of conquest- doesn’t fit with the picture the Scriptures draw of deeper love.  God creates, God nurtures, God gives to His creation.  Even salvation and the forgiveness of sins come to humankind as gifts, in an all-expenses paid ticket that you or I could never ever afford on our own.

When we try and think about loving as God loves, we make no space in our hearts for either lust or pity.  We let His direction subdue our affections, and while we experience longings normal to every person, we are able to navigate around temptations and love traps because we have pre-decided to let Him drive our hearts.  As Christians, we’re here to practice love as He intended us to- thinking and doing for others in concert with the lead of His Spirit, learning to hear Him as we move through our days.  And we place our trust in His care for us and His providence that the romance part will show up when He thinks we are ready.

Josh Harris wisely talks about this kind of approach to love and relationships in his blockbuster book, “I Kissed Dating Goodbye”.  I wish I had been able to read the book 25 years ago when the subjects of love and romance first entered my mind.  I did have enough sense back then to see through a lot of the self-interest that doubles as dating.  But the world presses in on us, and we think having a boyfriend or girlfriend will meet the love need inside of us.  The big love need still must be filled by God.  The romantic one is filled when, walking with Him, He brings us to another who walks with Him, and shows us we are meant to go on forward- and to serve- together.