love (spring break log 4)

i've been in love before. from my experience, it can consume you. i'll be sitting in class, listening to lecture, and all that is within me wants to be with that person. it changes the way you think, the way you live your life, the way you spend your time. changes simple things like the way you dress or the way you smell or the way you drive because you want to do whatever you can to please that person.

if you had a date with someone you were in love with, you would try to do everything you could to make that night perfect. you would try to plan it down to a T, you would speculate and strategize and think of things you could talk about if things went wrong. you could spend the entire day leading up to that night thinking about it, letting it control you. you could spend the whole week in preparation and anticipation. you would still do all the things you normally do - you could go to school and do homework and go run, heck, even run hard, but your mind wouldn't be there. you would still be captivated in your heart, you would still be waiting for that moment when you would finally be with the one you love.

do you know what i'm talking about?

because that is the relationship we are supposed to have with God.

and i realize i don't really love God the way i might love somebody else. i realize i would drive two hours one way to see my sister for a weekend, but i don't know if i would go two hours out of my way to see God move. i'll let a girl influence the way i dress or the way i act, but i'm not sure i would let God influence the way i live my life or the way i behave.

and the answer is that...i haven't thought about God in a loving way for a long time. when i started becoming a Christian, i could spend the entire school week waiting in anticipation for Friday night, where i could hang out with my youth group friends and worship and learn about God. big events like lock-ins or mission trips could hold my interest for weeks in advance and i would still be buzzing about with excitement weeks later. junior year, that was all that got me through school. i had fallen in love, and it wasn't like i threw everything away. i still worked hard and upheld my responsibilities... but it didn't matter so much. my heart was set on God.

nowadays, things have changed a bit. i dive into the Word, but it's sometimes a different atmosphere. i know i'm supposed to pray to God, because such is vital to relationship with God, so i try to pray. and i try to read a lot of the Bible...tried to go through all of Proverbs this past week. even back here in school, most of my nights are filled with Bible studies and trying to be more and more "Christian." but it's different.

because treating it like obligation sucks the passion out of it. praying to God only because you have to or you feel you should takes emotion out of it, makes it habitual, like a chore. before you know it, you don't even have to think. do you come alive when you take a test or take out the trash? do you come alive meeting the status quo, doing everything you should? i'm not saying we should stop doing any of these things - they're important, and we do them for a reason. but we don't do relationships.

the joy of relationship is in interaction. it is in talking, meeting, working with another person. you don't do a healthy relationship...you touch it and feel it and work with it and spend nights speculating over it and you fall in love with it. that's where the passion is...seeing the joy in someone else's face, seeing their pleasure, feeling their touch. anything less is work.

but yet...we treat God like work. we grudgingly go to church and tithe, we sing our songs without any thought, we pray and read our Bibles like we believe we should and sometimes we change and sometimes we don't change. you know what? God probably wants us to change, but there's something that He wants even more. our hearts... He wants to consume us with passion and love, to spend time with us, to sit you down and make you still and wrap you in His arms because our lives are frantic and we rarely take time to be still and consider what our lives have become and where we are going. and it's easy to think that as long as we do certain things, we will be healthy.

well, it's not that, and life gets boring after a while if all we ever do is do. but God calls us to great things; Paul calls it the "more excellent way" than any of the spiritual gifts. to be driven by love - that would be huge. to be able to go to school and do homework and to do everything we do, and yet not be able to get God off of our minds. to so greatly, genuinely anticipate the day we can spend in church, a time when we can catch a glimpse of God, when we can see Him move. to hear someone talk about God and let it bring us to tears. i suggest that this is what life is meant to be and what we should desire.

driving to church today, i wondered what i desired out of today. i had been praying this for a while - i prayed i would be glorifying to God. but i realized...everything's already created for God's glory. i'm going to be glorifying to God no matter what, whether i want to or not, just as everyone will be glorifying to God in the end. what i want to do is fall in love with God. i want to choose God over everything. i want Him to consume my heart - i don't want Him as an addiction, but i want to be so in love that i consciously know both sides and cannot find anything that i would rather do than spend time with God.

i don't want this to be a post that makes you feel lost or like you haven't loved God for a while. i want it to be encouraging... because we do have a High Priest who can sympathize with our weaknesses. He knows what we go through and He knows what goes on in our heads...He died for us as we were still sinners. even in our worst moments, that was what God died for, and that's what He hopes to redeem. for the times when we rejected God straight to His face, He died for those times. i think loving God has a lot to do with confidence in approaching Him - knowing that He is who He says He is...a Redeemer, a Savior, mighty like a Lion, and peaceful like a Lamb, the God above all, and yet someone who has set everything He has upon capturing the attention of your heart.

it's funny that today happens to be Easter, and the only part of this post i had thought of was the first two paragraphs and everything else followed, but i would really like to encourage whoever you are as well as myself to...try to fall in love with God. we understand what it means to fall in love with another human being, but if we were to fall in love with God, i think things would be so much greater and fulfilling. in fact, it would be life-changing. the ramifications would be endless - if we realized how great God's love is for us and happened to fall in love with Him in response. i can think of nothing greater.

anyways, happy easter. Jesus is alive.