Love Ain't Always How It's Cracked Up to Be

So, we're in the early stages of Summer 2022. It's early June, and it's wedding season if you don't know what that means in the South. Attending a school like mine means that every late May to early August provides plenty of opportunities to put on nice clothes, see some friends, and bust a move. But it also allows you to glimpse an all-too-common depiction of love through a flower girl, rings, and a white dress. 

I'm actually going to another wedding this week (shoutout to my buddy Sean), and it got me thinking again about the subject of love. Why does love matter? How does someone get or give love? Shoot, do we even need love at all? But before all that... what the heck is it?

We hear love songs all the time, but two favorites are I Wanna Know What Love Is by Foreigner and What is Love by Haddaway. In the latter tune, the German singer asked his presumptive audience of one the following question: "What is love? Baby, don't hurt me. Don't hurt me, no more." Foreigner makes a plea to his crush, "I wanna know what love is, and I want you to show me."

 

We just can't get away from love, love, love, love, love, can we? I found out that 64.5% of all songs were love songs. There are movies whose titles run along the spectrum from Love, Actually to Crazy, Stupid Love. Thousands of studies come out year after year on the subject of love, showing how different love can be with our mental faculties in comparison to other emotions. If we watch a tv show or movie that is absent a love story, most of us will ask, "Geez… then what's the point?"

 

Why? Why is it that love takes much of the air that we breathe? How come it just won't get away? Because we all relate. It's a feeling everyone possesses. We all want to love because we have plenty of it to give. The Bible gives an interesting response to our friends Haddaway and Foreigner roughly two thousand years before:

 

"Love is patient; love is kind. Love does not envy, is not boastful, is not arrogant, is not rude, is not self-seeking, is not irritable, and does not keep a record of wrongs. Love finds no joy in unrighteousness but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. Love never ends."

1 Corinthians 13:4-8a

 

We know that set of verses, right? It's draped in fancy script letters every Valentine's Day and virtually any wedding we attend. But that's not all that the Bible says about love. We find that:

 

⁃ Love is confusing

⁃ Love is hard to hear

⁃ Love is not always well-stated

⁃ Love requires sacrifice

⁃ Love comes in many different forms

⁃ Love is difficult

⁃ Love can lead to disagreements

⁃ Love judges and will be judged

⁃ Love hurts

 

We don't see that at weddings, do we? That's not the catchy bridge to the song, is it? It may make for a good rom-com, as long as it results in a happy ending, but those identifiers with love aren't fun, not even close. It's less appealing. If you've never heard of love before reading this, you might think, "Love kinda sucks."

 

I helped lead a ministry called Noonday. This past year allowed students to share something that God is doing in their life. I was hard-pressed to hear a message that didn't reference the love of God. People would say it's the center of their identity. It's the focus of their minds and hearts. The love of God led them through their most difficult trials. 

 

But I want to pull back the curtain a little bit further. So, let's go back to the question. What is love? Well… going back to Scripture, we find 1 John saying that God is love. That's a pretty good answer, right? I sure think so. When we find out who God is, we find out what we love. Taking it a step further, the more time we spend in a relationship with God, the more we know about the nature of love. 

 

Looking deeper into the love of our lives with our wants and desires will give a perspective of love, but not everything. It will reveal a piece of the pie, and while it may taste pretty dang good, you're not gonna find the recipe to make it.

 

There are two Biblical events that most clearly show the definition of love. If you thought that we would crack open the Song of Songs, you're wrong. I will wager it's found in The Fall of Man in Genesis 3 and the Death of Christ in Luke 23. Maybe that's not where you thought I was going with it, but please bear with me.

 

First, looking at the story of Creation, God did not have to say, "Let there be ___," but he did. There was no need to make man in his image. There was no need for a garden. Especially when man sinned, God had every reason to scrap the project and start over, but he didn't. 

 

He did, in fact, separate Adam and Eve from his presence. He pushed them from the garden and threw cherubim at the front of the place, barring any future entry. Still, he allowed the human experience to continue, nonetheless. The fall of man was incredibly disappointing. We read the event and would like to skip it if we had the chance. It's a misunderstood display of love because God stuck with his creation. 

 

But going deeper into that, he made a promise back, in the beginning, saying that the woman's seed would crush the head of the serpent. That promise made in a disappointing situation was a sign that God was connected to them, whether he liked it or not. But, going back to 1 John, God is love, meaning that he was willing to chain himself to his prized yet puzzling creation.

 

Once Adam and Eve sinned, they noticed they were naked. They sewed some leaves together to cover themselves from their otherwise odd figures. God realized this, and he killed an innocent lamb for them in the face of coming judgment. He killed the animal to serve as a better covering. He showed love by letting the human experience continue, providing better clothing to two undeserving folks. That sheepskin was a sign of love, too.

 

God loved so much that he would bless with life and clothes amidst the separation. Which leads us to the death of Christ. Without a Cross, there is no tomb, and the Crucifixion was quite the display of love. Going back to our not-near-as-fun list of love descriptors, you can plug and place each one for the Crucifixion.

 

The Crucifixion is confusing. It's hard to watch. If you've seen Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, you know what I'm talking about. It was a cataclysmic event. At the time, it would not have been fun to talk about. Crucifixions were public displays of embarrassment for all to see. They aimed to say, "This person messed up, and if you're not careful, it could happen to you too!!" Christ's death hurt him, and to an extent, hearing of the pain a perfect man suffered, it should hurt us too.

  

Sure, we have our cross necklaces and stuff. Still, no one actually enjoyed seeing criminals getting crucified unless they had some fetish about it, right? The love of God, coming in the flesh through Christ, was brutally murdered on the cross. That's confusing, complicated, and misunderstood if we're not careful.

 

No one deserves that love because Christ did not deserve that death. If you grew up in Church, you heard that all the time. I could repeatedly talk about our lack of deserving of God's love and that we do not deserve that sacrifice, and you might even be numb to that statement. I get it, but it's true. From the beginning until now, we do not deserve love, yet we get it anyway. 

 

But it's a sign of hope and connection. It's a sign of fulfillment. It's a sign that someone loves us and means it, going so far that he made a promise thousands of years ago and fulfilled it, again and again, day after day.

 

Across space and time, love is clearly confusing, complicated, misunderstood, and disappointing. It's a reality that may seem gross and embarrassing depending on the display, but love is worth it.

 

I might not be able to accurately explain or display love, but that doesn't matter. To my family and friends, my love is imperfect, filled with holes, and second-rate at best. No song, poem, film, or wedding can fully explain that, but it doesn't have to. Why? We can fix our eyes on the most lavish giver and provider of love. We can sit, embrace, and take in the presence of God daily, wherever we are. 

 

Only then can we indeed find what love is.