True Love: such an elusive creature, running up and tapping us on the shoulder then running away before we can grasp it in our hungry hands. I can't tell you when I began looking for it, for I'm sure that it was even before I can remember. I'm sure it's the same for all of us, and if you say it's not true then you just haven't realized it yet. And somehow we all manage to look in the wrong places too. Not that we all look in bad places, but we do all look in wrong places. I looked for unconditional love from my family and my friends, and my heart was continually broken from the disappointment that each successful letdown afforded me. That's what happens, though, when you pour your whole heart into a relationship hoping that it will fill the emptiness inside of your aching, lonely heart.

I'm only beginning to realize how messed up my ideas about love are. When I think about love I think about what makes me feel good, what makes me happy, what I like, what I want. Love is none of that. Love, True Love, is what makes others feel good, what makes God happy, what others like, what others want. True Love has nothing to do with me, me, me. True Love is all about God and others, and I mean all about them. At least, it should be.

But our idea of True Love is even more twisted and corrupt than we realize. We hold onto a picture of love that is tainted not only in its subject, but also its backdrop, lighting, color, shading, and every other bit of the picture. That's probably why God had to give us a picture of True Love that was completely different from the picture we had: any similarities and we would have thought that we were right.

So God took wealth out of the picture. He came to earth with nothing: Jesus had nothing but the clothes on His back. He had no home, no job, no schooling, no fallback. Nothing. He took family out of the picture too: Jesus' family didn't believe Him or support Him and His ministry. His friends, too, were often less than supportive: they didn't understand, didn't always believe, and at the end of Jesus' life they didn't even stick with Him. And He took romance out of the picture too. Jesus didn't dabble in romantic relationships, didn't have that kind of relationship with a woman, and yet His life was more full of love than any of ours. I'm not saying that romantic love is bad - far from it - but surely we have missed the point if we think that True Love is synonymous with romantic love. But most importantly, Jesus took Himself out of the picture: that is, He took His wants, desires, wishes, and even His needs out of the picture. Instead, He became the artist painting a beautiful picture of True Love in everyone else's lives and leaving His own canvas empty for God to fill up.

There was no equality to Jesus' kind of True Love. He loved people that were infinitely inferior to Him, loved them more than He loved Himself. He loved them through all the pain and the mess, through the screw-ups. It's hard to imagine how much hurt He must have gone through every day, seeing so many people that He loved with such infinite love make such foolish choices and reject the real life that He offered them for free. No strings attached. Yet somehow we think that we have a right to choose which people are most worthy of our finite, highly conditional love. We are so prideful.

It's funny, we don't think of God's love as a no-strings-attached kind of love. We think of God's love and instantly we think of a hundred things that we have to be doing for God in order to still feel His love. Even those of us who believe we can't lose God's love still believe that we have to do something to feel His love, to feel Him close to us. We don't really believe that His love is completely, unconditionally free. We don't think of redemption as freeing, but as transference of our slave-selves from sin to God. We don't really believe we are free, free to live, free to make mistakes, free to choose God every day. We feel stuck, like we signed a contract and now we must live up to it no matter how unpleasant it is. Perhaps this is because we have never before really experienced that kind of True Love and we are such hardened cynics and skeptics that we can't even give God a chance to give us this absolutely free, absolutely unconditional True Love that requires nothing of us but gives everything to us.

That's what True Love is. It is not taking from people, but neither is it about a give and take. True Love is absolutely 100% giving, giving, giving. True Love is never 50/50, True Love gives 100% no matter what the other person is giving (be it 0%, 100%, or anything in between). That's why we can't give True Love unless we have first received it, and the only One who can give us real, unconditional, True Love every moment of every day for the rest of eternity is God. People mess up, People leave, People die, relationships don't always last forever, but God is always, always, always there.

It's almost like God took everything that we think is beautiful out of Jesus' kind of love, as if to show us that that's not what it's about. It's not about the feelings, because our sin gave Jesus more pain, suffering, and heartache than a normal human being can handle. True Love, as we define it, is not supposed to hurt like that. But it does. True Love hurts more than most people think, more than we want it to. But True Love is always worth the hurt, and that is something that Jesus saw. Something that we have yet to realize. We think that if something hurts that means we need to change. Sometimes that's not true. Sometimes we have to accept the hurt as part of living and loving in a fallen world and continue to give as we continue to receive from God.

We often fall because of our foolishness. We think that we feel more pain then God does, and somehow that exempts us from offering the same unconditional love that God has given to us. What we don't see is how much pain God must feel. We all, every human on this planet, have hurt God. We think of our sin as some abstract thing that just makes God really mad at us, but I don't think that's quite the way it works. I don't think He's mad, but sad, hurt, weeping from the way we reject His love and kill our own souls in the process. And we think the infinitesimal amount of pain we feel negates our responsibility to love extravagantly the way that God loves.

It is hard to reconcile the image of a weeping God with an infinite God. It is hard for me to think of God as being hurt by my sin. How can an Almighty God be hurt by someone infinitely smaller, weaker, and less important? True Love, that's how. True Love requires openness, and openness comes with vulnerability. Vulnerability comes with the possibility, nay the probability, of pain. In other words, in order for God to really, fully love us with His deepest, Truest Love for us He had to open Himself up to the possibility and the probability of our rejection and rejection hurts.

So if God, in all of His power, is wiling to submit Himself to the pain of being rejected by every human that ever has, does, or will walk the planet, who are we to complain about the few really painful relationships that we have to deal with in this lifetime? Do they hurt? Heck yes! I don't mean to say that we shouldn't feel pain, or that we should feel guilty for feeling pain. The pain is real, the pain hurts, but pain should never deter us from doing what God wants us to do, and our very first mission in life as children of God is to love.

But we cannot force love, True Love has to come from deep inside, and they only way that love can flow out of who we truly are is if we first love God and let Him love us and fill us with the kind of True Love that the world needs. We cannot do this apart from God, so our first focus must always be on our relationship with God.

So stop trying to earn this kind of love, because if it has to be earned it's not what you're looking for anyway. Stop trying and start just letting God love you! Then do for God out of a sense of wholeness - you in Him, Him in you. What we do for God first must come out of who we are in God. We cannot serve God as we were made to until we feel His True Love moving through us, filling us with that kind of True Love and a desire to serve and to love however and wherever God puts us. Let God just love you first!