Have you ever thought about what it really means to love someone? What it takes, what it looks like, what it sounds like, how it feels? I have been reading a book that has opened my eyes deeper to these questions seriously worth pondering. Thinking them through with every part of who I am and then thinking through them again through the eyes of the One who really knows. He who has demonstrated love in its purest form to us already.
Ted Dekker is an amazing author whom I have had the privilege of gaining insight and wisdom from through his profound writings. Specifically, his book titled "The Bride Collector". Laying the mystery and the chase aside within the jackets of this novel, the threads of likeness to how God loves all of us- "His favourites"- are very hard to miss.
While reading the ending, a tear-jerker of realisations to be sure, I learned something revealing of myself. I am angry. I am actually really angry and I could not understand fully why until now. The images of sacrificial love, by a human friend, bounced around between my ears until they made there mark in the heart of my spirit. I became privy to the fact that I have let myself hate someone and blame them for the walls now between me and a best friend. I was even angry at my best friend for in a sense rejecting me. Mislabelling their actions as hurtful rather than an invitation for healing. I projected my anger to the wrong places and held onto it unjustly.
Can you imagine a parallel comparison, being angry at God for letting Jesus die for our freedom? How could we hate Him given the valour to conquer the very depths of deaths grip on us? The death of Jesus was in a sense "worth it" for the lives of all mankind. To silence the grip the enemy had on us.
I was angry because a great friend, my best friend, gave up their choice to love me by sacrificing themselves to love me. This might have sounded confusing. Let me say it another way to be sure you get the picture in my heart. The best way a person can love someone is by letting their personal needs and wants go in order to set the one they love free.
Recently someone did this for me and I at first did not see the magnitude of their living sacrifice. A quote depicting this, "you have to let him [or her] go [to risk their very life with and for you] because you love him [or her] and you have to trust him [or her] to be who he [or she] is for you [in order to release your grip on them so that you can both be set free]" (P. 399 The Bride Collector). This is love in its purest form. Grace to its fullest.
Seeing it from my friends perspective, through the help of one of Ted Dekker's characters, I read these words "leaving her [or him] there to suffer yet another abandonment had wrenched his [or her] heart but he [she] knew that he [or she] might never have another opportunity to save, really save, her [or him]..."(P. 401 The Bride Collector). Letting them leave because they want the best for me, in my case, was more life giving than trying to remain in love with them. Holding onto them for the sake of feeling loved, or for some being rescued by them, is wrong. Feeling loved was not as important as actually experiencing real love. Witnessing its selfless offering.
I am compelled to forgive the targets of my anger. A facet of love. To not only set them free from the arrows of my mind but to speak the truth that they are loved implicitly by another- by the One who made them. Identifying to them that no fault, no misgiving, no behaviour or human act can separate them from the Love of the Father. Silencing my anger and loving them enough to point them to whom loves them them most. More than humanly possible.
I think this is what Jesus would want us to know about His death for us. That He knew that leaving us, for a time as a human man on the cross, would be immeasurably far greater a love than to simply remain with us. Preventing the pain and fear of the unknown, the cross for a time brought for our sake, would not keep us safe from what hurts us most. Allowing the confusion and heart wrenching emotions, for a time while people mourned, was more beneficial to our future than safeguarding our hearts in the moment of His death. His pain and desire to have us experience the purest love of all hurt Him, yet it offered an eternal solution to false love and the fear of rejection for all eternity. Proving before all creation that the greatest gift really is not having all the answers or feeling loved, but instead, to lay ones life down for a friend. The rawest act of being loved- beyond all cost.
