What Love REALLY Looks Like

Billboards, Youtube, Snapchat, Instagram. The world is a speedy mechanism of quick snapshots, promising us what “real” love looks like…

And we must long for it…

Because these images hook us. We must desire something deeply…

Because we have created an entire generation so glued to their phones, they get lost in not seeing the people standing right beside them.

It’s a day of desperate hopes and dreams…

Where people prostititute authenticity, replacing living and breathing people for the false reality of chasing images guaranteeing love.

And I see them and am guilty of posting some; photos of dates with my husband, lavished trips, images hugging my children….

Love has shifted to something we can “get”, something we “earn”, “demand”, “proclaim” or even “need”…

But if love is like the wind, who can hold it in their hands? If love is bigger than us and eternal, won’t it s

lip quickly from the greedy….

Those who try to control, insist or force it?

And doesn’t love flow freely towards the unexpecting, content….live inside the peaceful, stick to those most who are outward focused, humble, selfless?

We are not magnets of selfishness. Yet, in todays world, we can live so selfish…hoarding and gloating, coveting and denoting anything in our proximity….claiming it should be ours.

When the very core of love isn’t wanting, getting, gaining, marrying. The heart behind real, authentic love (His heart) is giving, sacrificing, surrendering, serving…

And could it be, we did not teach our children well, to first and foremost accept and know themselves…know their identity?

Our identity the foundation where every strong and beautiful thing dwells from. It’s the place the enemy targets us most…

Because if the enemy can get us to question, doubt, or sacrifice who we are…the rest is lost.

So many are filling their minds with anything and everything in hopes to hide from their fears, live behind a screens, find their dreams in another man’s purpose…in hopes not to be alone…

But didn’t faith giants of old’ unwaveringly walk in their true identities; though fallable and broken, imperfect and dependent?

Didn’t they find their peace in the moments, learned contentment and accepting most who God simply said they were.

Nothing shook them…not the mocking of man, the size of their present cirucmances, or the lies that often tried derailing them.

Then, out of the overflow of their identity….they gave…offered their lives as living sacrifices to help people, so others too could reach the mountain they themselves once struggled to climb.

But, in a day so many are blind….so many stumble, like exiled lepers, demanding like beggars….how can this generation really love?

How can healing come? How can The One that stepped low from His throne, fill up a man, deperate only to “get”?

Isn’t it in the pouring out, we receive…in the giving and serving, there is the most healing?

Yet, Corzine once said, “God is like a greart heart surgeon, trying to give us the heart we need…but we keep flopping around on the table, moving away from the knife.”

Is it what benefits us most, our sin-nature most purposely avoids and despises?

• The selfish one, needing to serve others, driving them from their implosion?
• The greedy one needing radical generosity to strip them from their gluttony?
• The sorrowful one, needing to bring another’s encouragement, to find the great hope they themselves are missing?

Yes, maybe love isn’t inward focused?

 Maybe it is in the bowing low and coming down, and giving our lives in service for anothers good that changes us most, on the inside?

Maybe it is the realization that our empty vessels are sufficient…and it is in the giving ourselves to His workmanship which indwells us most with His light?

Maybe it is in a life broken and given away that denotes true life…serving others filling us in a way that stale images could never satisfy?

Maybe our choices open us up to Him or bring us farther away from His goodness. Period.

And it is in the selfless choices we grow like Him most…eventually knowing and believing…with Him there is nothing we can’t do….

We can be a blessing, because hope was made for sharing…

Yet, isn’t free choice “a terrifying compliment God pays” us? (Dr. Regis Martin)

And can’t good works actually be a tool God uses to purify us from the attachment of sin and selfishness?

So, why do we wait to get “whole” before turning our eyes away from us…before serving our fellow “man”?

Why do we hope to become “Instagram perfect” before leaving the walls imploding on us, making conscious acts of selflessness that could help someone around us?

What if we looked outward daily, intentionally….

Stepped out to buy another’s groceries, helped someone across the street, took pity on the needy?

Could it be selfless becomes part of our process of the healing our hearts, His love filling us more completely?

Instead of being a heavy “burden”, maybe God gave us of “service” as evidence of His heart? A gage to measure the depths of His love in us…

And if we looked at how we served, we might see evidence of what REAL love looks like…because He medoled selfless sacrifice by letting love brought Him to a cross.

And in the process, would the gaps we experience find pieces of God’s grace rising up in us and making us whole again?

Maybe it is love, the kind that considers others more than ourselves, that has a way of drawing us towards the One that conquered sin and death?

And it is in His Light and Love, we find true holiness, purity, peace and a cure to this epidemic of selfishness.

Maybe it’s in the wonder of His very own footsteps, as He walked to His glorious cross, that darkened and shook the heavens….separating not so much the “good” and “bad”….but the selfish and the selfless….

“When we stand before Christ, the Judge, all the compromises we’ve made, all the gray areas into which our choices have led us, have to be accounted for”. (Martin)

Will we live selfish or selfless?

Selfish love hides behind screens, implodes ignorantly, eventually destroying everything in its path, but…

Selfless love makes choices with the best of others benefit in mind. It gives willingly and welcomingly, sacrificing anything in the world we might cling to…

And eventually, drawing us closer to His light.