Love-Grace

What does it mean to be loved? To love?
Life is a journey and a quest and we are searching for something. What is it? When we are born we are like a puzzle with one missing piece... everything is mostly there yet something is wrong... there is an incompleteness we feel like there is a hole in our souls. The quest for this missing piece of existence goes on until death. We look for it in family we look for it in nature... we look for it in work, we look for it in friends, we look for it in our significant other. So often we think we have found the missing piece... and it looks like it is the right piece... but something is wrong no matter how hard you try to make it fit and make the puzzle complete it doesn't work and it has to be forced in and can damage the whole puzzle.
What are we looking for... what drives us on as Humans... is it the will to survive? why do we want to survive? This search for this missing piece has driven people mad. People try to fill it with money, sex, loyalty, patriotism, hedonism, power... to name a few. We are willing to put ourselves through whatever it takes to find this piece... all of us will die trying. What is this thing we should be searching for. What truth is it that we are looking for... what is this thing missing from our lives that we risk so little in order not to lose what we think it is, or risk so much to try to gain it?
Like everyone else reading this I am alive and I do things... why i am alive, and why I do things is an important question... Although I believe it is more complicated than this, I will sum up by saying... We act or behave in a certain manner because we believe that the behaviors are worth behaving and the actions are worth acting. While some people are more aware of why they do things than others I believe that this is true. Whether we indulge a impulse or deny it... it is all for the good of whatever we think will complete the missing puzzle piece. This is why People have religion, this is why people seek success this is why people kill themselves, this is why people stop people from killing themselves. So far I have just been making observations... and to sum up all I have basically just made an analogy by saying, that People do different things for many different reasons... and the reason that they do those things is because there is something incomplete and missing and their attention is always drawn to it like a missing piece in a puzzle.
So some people would say that each person has a different missing piece and that we succeed in filling it. The the BTK killer has his missing piece and Mother Theresa has hers. I believe along with with many other optimists that there is something out there that we are looking for that will complete us. Some people say screw it lets just enjoy our lives... but even they are trying to fill the hole with pleasure... others with suicide... what ever it is it consumes us all.
So here is a theory... at first it will sound really corny and it is but that is because the word i am going to use is so over used... and has so many different meanings and each one of those meanings change depending on the context. So we all know what the word is... LOVE.

Now what is LOVE. Friends say they love each other, families say they love each other, Boys and Girls say they love each other... this is something that is cross cultural... family friends and desire for the opposite sex happens all around the world. The problem is that we generally do not want to be Loved. What people often substitute for love is value. They want to be validated... they want recognition that what they are doing in order to find that missing puzzle piece, has value and is the correct way. This is why we as humans love community in all cultures because when there is a close knit community there is similar culture and approach to living life and searching for what is missing and that in itself feels like what is missing it feels like it completes us because there is an agreement with others that what you are doing is worth doing and that helps you convince yourself that you are on the right track. Unfortunately that isn't love.

Love can't be earned... it can only be given away... if it's earned it's not love... its a business agreement... where everything is based on rules and formulas for ones behavior... love isn't rational. You see glimpses of love in nature the way a woman loves her child unconditionally... the way a man and woman are when they love one another. The problem with this love is that it is so easily perverted to something else. When a boy and girl meet and start to like each other this is close to love... it doesn't matter what they do how they look they will like each other anyways and will be hurt by the smallest inclination that the other person does not love then back... this drives them to try to act in a way that encourages this loving behavior and if the loving behavior stops in any moment there is hurt and the hurt is greater because we believe that we earned or deserve in some way that affection. As soon as we have this attitude it is no longer love. In my culture and many others I believe this is the biggest obstacle to understanding real love. It is undeserved and freely given. This is very hard to understand if We have never been loved before. An Essential Ingredient of Love is forgiveness. Forgiveness is a very unnatural phenomenon... Now many people will forgive others and they have no idea what love is but this is a different kind of forgiveness. It is an earned forgiveness. Without LOVE there is no unearned forgiveness. We only forgive if the other person is sorry enough or makes right their wrong. LOVE is radical and forgives even if the other person isn't sorry.

So Where does this crazy radical idea LOVE come from... How come we have so much trouble with it? why is it that we have so much trouble loving each other? The answer is that LOVE is what is missing from our puzzle. We are trying to learn how to LOVE from one another when none of us know how to love. If we try to fill in what is missing from each other it will fail because we kinda know the shape of the missing piece but none of us have it. So everything we come up with ultimately fails. So how do we find LOVE... LOVE is something that must be freely given... But nobody has it to freely give. Awhile ago I wrote this.

We are afraid of showing our true faces... cause underneath our counterfeit countenance there are scars and underneath those scars are painful festering wounds that we have inflicted on ourselves and one another. We have ignored them for too long... we no longer feel the hurt... we no longer feel... anything... we are a sad starved people with thin smiles stretched over aching broken hearts ...

this is our condition... we are a desperate people... we are a starving people ever searching to satisfy the bottomless pit that is our soul...

I believe that this resonates with many of us... So are we Doomed to feel empty and unfulfilled... Are we Doomed to stretch smiles over our miserable broken faces? Do the pleasures that this world have to offer... satisfy? These are questions we all must answer... If we keep on searching and believe that there is such thing as LOVE... that means that there must be a LOVER. That must mean that there is out there A GOD who sees our incompleteness and FREELY LOVES us. There is a GOD that somehow shows us how to LOVE. A GOD that showed HIS love to us in a way that is so radical so counter intuitive to how we do it on our own. HE freely sent His Son Jesus to die for us to pay the price for our sins, that we may be forgiven,and so that we know what LOVE is, and we no longer have to go through the rest of our lives aimlessly with out direction trying to search for what is missing. With Jesus we have what is Missing and no longer need to search for it...

If this is true then why are so many Christians struggle with LOVE and stuff... The answer we need to continually receive the LOVE that is freely given. So often we begin to thing that we earned it, or found it, or thought it up, and that if everyone else did what we did then they would be complete as well... and we forget that It was the LOVE that Completed us. So I would like to encourage you... Receive the amazing LOVE that GOD FREELY gives. And once you have it keep on receiving it and you will keep on giving it away... Hold on to Jesus Pray without ceasing thank GOD for his LOVE... Read the Bible... Receive LOVE... We don't have to earn it, we can't earn it, IT is freely given through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Wow this is a long post