It's the most fundamental and critical of all the desires of the human heart. The desire to be enjoyed, the desire to be liked, the desire to be accepted, or as we are going to refer to it, the desire to be loved unconditionally.
We want to be fully known, to be real, to be genuine and to just be ourselves.
We want to know that if we lay all our cards out on the table, we won’t have to worry about everybody else cashing in and walking away, either out of fear or disgust.
We want to feel loved, needed and important just because of who we are, and not what we do.
We want to know that if we have a bad day, or a bad week, or a bad year, we will still be loved.
Basically, we want to know that if we were a stinky face, someone would still love us!
But, we primarilly act on this desire by becoming obsessed with gaining the approval and love of others. And the only problem with that is it causes us to live fake, tentative, and hidden lives; afraid that at any moment the "real us" will be found out and the love will stop.
How foolish it is, though, to live this way and to look to someone else to fulfill this desire because everybody else is struggling with and searching for the same exact thing! So how in the world could they possibly give me something they don’t even have!?
But where should we go then? Should we just conclude that the fickle, merit based love we have experienced thus far in life is as good as it gets? Should we just throw our hands up and stop searching for unconditional love because we are tired of being dissappointed? Or should we allow our desire to be loved to push us past earthly relationships and draw us to something and someone so much greater?
In Malichi 1:1-2, God stands up among all of the fake, cheap imitations of love and proclaims "I love you!" But, we respond with doubt and disbelief. "How have you loved us God?!"
How would you answer this question and how do passages like Isaiah 49:15-16 , Isaiah 62:4 , Jeremiah 31:3, Psalm 18:1-19, and Ezekiel 16:4-14 help us to answer this question?
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3 comments:
Do I get brownie points for being the first to comment? Usually I am not a blogger, but I am willing to give it a go.
First of all I am glad that we are talking about the desire to be loved unconditionally first, because I honestly think that there is no one who doesn't struggle with this or hasn't related in some way to it before. I know that I can see this coming in and out of my life all of the time. I see this in my desire to be recognized and loved and cherished by others. I see it in my dissapointment when I realize that I can't be perfectly, completely, and unconditionally loved by a guy in a romantic realtionship regardless of how "christian" we are. I have seen this in the past in dealing with tragedy and asking God why he could let bad things happen to me if he really loved me unconditionally. And I see this affecting my behavior in relationships when I am judgemental and easily annoyed, because I can not give unconditional love if I am not receiving it.
Although I know that because of my weakness and brokeness I will never be able to master this kind of love, I know that God has mastered it because he authored it. I think the goal really is each day trying to grow more and more like Him and to daily receive and pour out a love that is more and more whole.
Just some of my thoughts...
I wish I could just master that feeling to be loved.. It really pisses me off that it's our survival instincts telling us to be loved.. If we didn't the population of the planet would probably be much smaller..
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