What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Love has always been a very elusive topic for me. No matter how much I read about it or heard about it, something about love just never made sense. Especially when I started thinking about how God loves me and has called me to love Him, myself and others. Do you know how many times the word love is mentioned in the Bible? Well, in the KJV (King James Version) which is the version I use, it is mentioned 131 times in the Old Testament and 179 times in the New testament. That is 310 times!
Love is probably one of the most memorable things Jesus taught. In John 13:34, He tells us that it is the new commandment, that we are to love others the way that He loves us. And how exactly does the triune God love? Well, this is what I know through research:
There are 4 types of love in the Bible:
Agape-unconditional, exists with no regard to changing circumstances, the perfect love God has for us
Eros: romantic love and/or sexual interest
Phileo: a kind of affection, a close bond/friendship/attachment (like what we feel towards friends and family
Storge: familial, naturally occurring love (not friendship)
Of course, this knowledge is all well and good, but for me, it didn’t do much. What did love feel like? What does it mean? Why is it so important? And why does everyone talk about it so much? I wanted he answers to these questions. However, I wasn’t really sure where to go get them.
Don’t get me wrong, I could understand what Bible scholars called phileo, liking someone and getting along with them but to me, it was never as deep an attachment as it’s portrayed in media or even as other people made it out to be. I could live with you or without you and even if we were “close” at one point, it was rather easy for me to forget someone existed at all, let alone that we were close. For a while, I thought that this made me a bad person, that I shouldn’t just forget my past friendships or colleagues. But that’s just how my mind works.
And when it came to storge and that familial love…for me, loving family wasn’t a prerequisite to being family. In good times, I liked them. In bad times, I hated them and the majority of the time, I tolerated them. I preferred to be alone because sometimes being around them (and people in general) made me sick to my stomach. Once again, this is why I felt like I was strange.
In movies and in books, people describe love as this awesome feeling that covers faults. They say, “I love you,” and that means that from that point on, things would be perfect, even in the bad times. But to me, those were just words I repeated when someone said them to me. How could you love me and then treat me poorly? Or do this thing that I hate? The love of real life and the love of movies didn’t add up and I had no idea which was the real thing. So, for the longest, I just repeated the empty words. I knew that love was supposed to mean something, evoke some emotion, but it didn’t. The closest I could ever get was a “like” that depended on the other person’s general mood and personality and what they’d done for me up until that point.
Avoiding Love
That being said, when I truly decided to learn more about God and was confronted with all the songs and sermons on His love for me, my first response was, “So what?” At the time, I couldn’t understand what the big deal was. I thought that all love meant the temporal, action-based thing I was used to. I had no idea that there were 4 types or that there was such a thing as unconditional love. It just didn’t click for me.
Who knows? I may just be cold but the love the Bible talked about and the love I was used to didn’t seem to match up. I could enjoy the songs and appreciate the sermons but there was an emptiness, a lack. And when I started hearing people say that no one could be a true Christian if they didn’t have the love of God, I panicked. I didn’t even know what that meant, how was I supposed to have it? My first response was doubt and sadness. I began to doubt my faith, doubt if I was a good person, doubt if I would ever make it into Heaven. And, as it often does, my doubt spiraled into sadness and hopelessness.
It took years for me to have hope again, to believe it was possible for me to be a true believer and have a relationship with God. However, there was still that “love” component. I avoided it at the start. I didn’t even want to think about it, didn’t want to spiral back out into depression and hopelessness. This worked for me for a while, instead of focusing on my shortcomings and what I lacked, I worked on the areas I knew it was possible to improve upon. While I began to grow in these areas, my faith and my hope and my confidence grew too. Perhaps it was possible for me, I wasn’t too far from God. In fact, love didn’t linger in my mind at all. Obviously there were still sermons and songs, people telling me they loved me but I chose to just ignore those lyrics, that part of the message. I chose to ignore those people or parrot back a sentiment I didn’t mean simply because it was expected. I got very good at this.
But as time passed, love began showing up more and more and I couldn’t understand why until I had a talk with someone I viewed as a mentor. And she let me know that God was trying to get my attention and that I needed to stop ignoring His call. This hadn’t even crossed my mind.
This is getting a bit long, but don’t worry part 2 is on its way!
