Confession: It's the Same Old Song...

Once again, it's confession time. I suppose I could do this properly at church, but I thought I'd just do it right here on my blog. It's just more interesting to use my blog as my own not-so-private confessional, right? Right.

Not that this is going to be too interesting. At all. You see, I'm here to confess the same thing I always do:

I have trouble loving people. I have trouble loving God.

But, isn't that how it goes with confession? You confess the same thing again and again, not because you're an idiot who can't seem to get her act together, but because what you're confessing--what I'm confessing--is a struggle. It's not just something that goes away overnight, though that idea does have a certain charm. No, it's something that's a real struggle, and it takes real work.

In order to better understand love, I decided to head to the source, to understand what God says about it. I think 1 Corinthians 13: 4-7 could be turned into a checklist for determining whether or not we love as God loves. It goes like this:

"4Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres."

Now, another confession. I couldn't check off much of anything there. I got two checks, and that's only if you count verse six as two different things. I do not delight in evil, and I do rejoice in the truth. Check and check. The rest of that stuff? I got nothing. Wherever it says what love is or does, I am or do the opposite. And verse seven? Nope. Nothing there either.

Even more baffling to me, is the fact that God just loves us. As in, He just loves us no matter what. I mean, we can turn away from God, live our lives in complete opposition to God, but He still loves us. There is nothing we can do to make God love us more than He does right this second.

Now, certainly there are repercussions for our actions; our turning away from God doesn't go unpunished. And, if you want to know about all of those repercussions, I can tell you a lot about them. Suffice it to say, they're not at all fun. In fact, they are the total opposite of fun. However, that punishment does not mean we are unloved; it actually means that God, like a heavenly Father, is looking out for us, directing our paths, using the still, soft voice of the Holy Spirit to guide us. Though, if you're like me, you'll totally ignore the gentle prodding, and then it'll be time for the rod and the staff. And, no matter what twenty-third Psalm says, I do not find those at all comforting, at least not right there in the moment.

But, He does all of that because He loves us. He always loves us.

I'll be honest. This makes no sense to me--none at all. You see, I love pretty selfishly. I don't love like God loves. I love people when they are as much like me as possible--when we have a similar sense of humor, when we read the same kind of books, when we have lots of interests in common. But, that's not love as God loves. If it was, He wouldn't love any of us, because we spend most of our time acting as little like Him as possible. And yet, He still loves us.

Maybe that's why I have a hard time loving God sometimes. I just don't get it. You see, for a while, I thought it would be a lot easier to love God if He was more like me. I mean, I wouldn't have said it that way or even really been aware of the fact that that's what I was doing. But, I really did want to love a God who was just like me.

I wanted a God who wouldn't think it was wrong for me to spend a lot of money on clothes or to be obsessed with shopping or to be completely irresponsible. I wanted a God who loved all the same books I did and wouldn't find anything amiss in any of them, a God who would share my taste in music and magazines and TV shows and movies. I wanted a God who, much like me, needed a lot of alone time so that we wouldn't have to communicate too often and that, when we did communicate, it would maninly be me asking for things, as I wanted a God who existed to fulfill my needs without holding me to any standards. I wanted a God whose laws were like my laws, but, now I realize that if God's laws were like my laws, my God wouldn't really take a stance on much of anything because I didn't take a stance on much of anything.

Anne Lamott--whose writing I like, but who I disagree with on a lot of things--calls what I was doing "making God in our image." Well, that's what I was doing, though I didn't know it and certainly wouldn't have confessed it. But, here I am confessing it now!

You see, the real problem with making God in my image was that I wasn't really loving God. I wasn't loving God as God loves me. God loves me just as I am. Though He tries to direct me, He doesn't just reach down from heaven and zap me into submission, however much it might feel like that sometimes. He doesn't do that because that's not real love.

My friend Alanna says that to truly love people, you have to love them for who they are, not for what you want them to be. Sometimes I'm not sure what she's talking about. If people actually were what I want them to be, they'd be even better than they are right now. And then they'd be a whole lot easier for me to love. See? Everyone wins.

Except that nobody but me really wins, and when I apply that sort of love to God, not even I win. When I chose to love my version of God, the one created in my image, I failed to truly love God as He is. I loved a God who fit my values, morals, ideas of right and wrong. However, the God I'd created wasn't actually God as He shows Himself to us in the Bible; in short, my version of God wasn't God. So again I failed to love God as He is, choosing to love only what I wanted Him to be. But, if God is the source of all good, how do I create an understanding of good that falls outside of the parameters He's created? Where does my authority to do that come from? If I do not look to God as the measure of good and of value, then to whom or to what do I look? How do I say to God, "I'd love to have a relationship with You, but I only want You on my terms?"

I guess I have the free will to do as I choose, and yet, by forcing God to fit my mold of what I think He should be, I'm failing to love God just as He is. When I fail to love God or anyone as they are, I fail to love them at all. I'm merely loving myself because I'm creating a relationship on my terms without considering who the other person, even if that's God, is. Again, I'm failing to truly love God. And, when I fail to love God, I miss out on the possibility of a real relationship with Him, and outside of that relationship, I have no way to understand love as God has created love.

Perhaps the only way to understand love as God loves is to understand that who He is, is a God who always loves. But, having a relationship with God, like having a friendship or a marriage, requires a certain amount of fidelity; it requires understanding who the other person is and loving the other person as is, without trying to change them to fit my image of what they should be.

In the case of loving God, I guess I had to understand that God was very different from my version of Him. He had standards and laws and values that I didn't always understand or even want to follow, and yet, fidelity to Him means submitting to those things, because that is the nature of a relationship to God. It's a realization that I can protest all I want, but that God, because of who He is not because of who I want Him to be, is always the One who is full of truth. And, in admitting that, I go a long way in understanding how to love Him, how to begin to have a real relationship with Him. And, in turn, I begin to learn to love as God loves, because, in loving God, I'm loving One who cannot be changed, One who will be the same today as He was yesterday. I am changeable; I change often. But, to love God, I have to keep loving Him, knowing that I can never escape Him, that He will not change to suit me, but that I must change in order to love Him truly.

So, that's my confession. I'm unloving, selfish, perhaps even idolatrous. All manner of terrible things. Yet, I'm still loved by God. Try to explain that kind of love. Better yet, maybe we should try to have that kind of love.