I'm afraid of the light

I am scared of love. There. I said it.

I have spent years building secret walls around my heart. (None shall pass. NONE SHALL PAAAAAASS!!) I always thought I did this for a couple reasons. One, I have never seen a healthy loving relationship that lasted up close. I don’t think this has made me jaded as much as it has shown me that even true love takes a lot of work and most people are lazy. That is not a good combination for a high success rate. And I HATE failure. Second, I was (and am) afraid of rejection. In order to truly love someone, you have to let them see you for who you really are. The good and the bad. Sometimes I pick my nose in the car and wipe it under the seat. (See. Who wants to spend their life with that?) I am afraid that I will show someone the clearest picture of who I am and they will still reject it. Then I would have to ask, “Is there not enough good or beauty in me to make me worthy of love?” (Please understand that I know God has made me wonderfully and knows me better than I know myself and loves me fully. But do not be so quick to forget that man is an irrational creature swayed by emotion and insecurity.)

Yesterday I found a third reason.

Love is the great light. Loving another may not reveal anything about them, but it always reveals something about you. I know now that if I truly and deeply loved another it would reveal a great deal about my true nature. What you do and say each day with someone you love reveals your true character. Love forgives and this creates the opportunity for sin. Anger, jealousy, selfishness, laziness, and so much more is often given more room to grow in the confines of love. If I choose to love, this great light will shine brighter on my life and I am afraid of what it will reveal. I am afraid that after I see myself in this light that knows no shadows, I may not love myself. I have seen glimpses of what my nature can produce and it makes me cry out with all my heart to let me decrease and Jesus increase.

All this introspection has made me wonder about our culture. Have people subconsciously realized this fact about love? Is that why this culture has become so distant and closed off? Maybe people have learned that if they stop and try to help those in need, it will just highlight how little they actually care for others. Maybe people know deep down that if stop to listen to someone they will have to see how little patience they truly have?

Although the light of love can be a scary thing, it is meant to bring about change. God loves us the way we are. But He also loves us enough to know that we will be happier when we are more like Him. When loves shines on us it offers the opportunity see the things inside us that need to change. It can be hard to see the ugliest parts of your self, but without seeing them, we will never become what we were created to be.

My Stop With God

Ralph Waldo Emmerson once wrote, “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown.” I disagree. Man has been cursed with a short memory. I know because I am one.

Life has a certain way of taking something that is so clear in one moment and covering it up in the next. My problem is that the second I lose sight of it, I can’t remember what it was truly like or how to find it again. This is a struggle I face over and over again in my relationship with God. My walk with God can many times be better described as my stop with God. The relationship that defines my existence has a tendency to get lost in the midst of that very same existence. The world that I am forced to walk through leaves it’s grease and grime over the most fundamental part of my life. As I attempt to fix this problem I don’t struggle with complacency nearly as much as I struggle with my approach.

I get sick of the muck covering my heart so I try to wipe it away, but I only succeed in blurring what’s underneath even more. As I said before the problem was not a lack of effort, but a bad approach. I always tried to find my way back to the heart of God in my strength. I would study harder to try to understand Him more. (How foolish am I trying to understand a God I cannot even fully comprehend?) That inevitably fails. So I try to love people to make it back to God, but the motive of my heart is clear to Him and the immovable will not be so easily manipulated. In a last ditch effort I pout, hoping God will have pity on such a poor soul. The Father is far too great a parent to encourage good results from bad actions. The more I tried the more blurred it became.

After all of this a friend gave me the best advice I have heard in a long time. She said, “Maybe if you stop trying to analyze God, He could reveal Himself to you.” (Light bulb moment!) God is not a mystery to be solved. He is not a boss waiting for you to complete an assignment. He is not a Father who sacrifices the long term to satisfy the short term. He is God.

I am going take that advice. I am going to seek Him just to be with Him. The bad news is I tried to fix it the only ways I knew how and learned I didn’t know how to fix it. But thanks to a friend, today I remembered the good news and that is that I don’t have to know how to fix it. I just have to remember to find the One who does.