Sunday, November 8, 2009

Imaginary Love

Yesterday turned out to be chick flick day! Charity and I watched He's Just Not That Into You and The Proposal. That was a lot of estrogen for me to handle. As I've proclaimed lately, I seem to be 70% dude, and that's being gracious.

At any rate, I got to thinking about love and how I have zero comprehension of the whole idea of it. Or, I like to say that's true. Truth is, I think I do understand love, but I'm too darn selfish to really take hold of it. I want love to be the Hollywood happiness. I want love to make me feel good. But when you think about love, it's not that at all.

Love sucks! It hurts. It's painful. Love moves us to do things that make us unhappy because love always does the right thing. The thing about love is this: it's not what we portray it to be.

So many of us (stupid, single, American girls) want to be happy and we think that if we fall in love and get married, we're going to be so happy that we will sing with cartoon birds and frolic in meadows of daisies.

Love doesn't make you happy.

So then what does it do? It makes you selfless. Love makes you give. Love makes you put someone else's needs and desires ahead of yours. Love makes you compromise. Love makes you surrender. I'm sorry, but none of those things sound appealing!

Most of me wants to keep pretending that love is something other than what it really is. The imaginary love is so much more beautiful than true love. The stories that come from imaginary love are much more romantic and sappy.

But real love wins in the end. Despite the pain and the grief and the sadness and the sacrifice necessary for real love, in the end, love wins. Take the example of our Savior---oh, the pain, the grief, the sadness, and the sacrifice! There was no beauty in that. There were no meadows of daisies in His life. Jesus's love was not about Himself, but about the one He loved. His love was selfless.

There is joy in love, but joy is not its purpose. The purpose of love is to give meaning to our lives outside of our own existence. Love puts us in fellowship with others and with God. True love binds us together because we esteem someone else as more important than ourselves. The love of Christ put us back into fellowship with Himself---with God.

What relationship can you redeem through love?

4 comments:

Kass said...

I love your blog posts and I look forward to reading them because they're always so thought-provoking. With that said...

You know more than you think about love. You hit it right on the money, girl. It's scarier when you know what you'd be walking into, isn't it?

Sizzledowski said...

Oh no, I'm SURE I know about it. I just don't like it.

Kass said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Kass said...

That's why I feel like the decision to have kids is a challenge. It's something I *should* do but knowing all that's involved, I'm NOT particularly keen on doing it. Maybe love and sacrifice should be synonymous?