Jonny Heart: Love?!... (Part 5)

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Love?!... (Part 5)

This begins my last and final post in this series on love. I have talked much on this subject, mainly discerning between the different types of relationship that we know to share; friendship, companionship, sharing, affection, and of course God’s love. I began this whole topic looking into my own heart and I feel that maybe I ventured from that getting lost in the verbose verbiage and for that I apologize first to my own heart and then to the reader.

Love always seemed to be a sappy touchy topic that everyone always wants to discuss or the opposite, neglect to mention when needed. In the beginning I asked a series of questions all of which I had asked myself because the occasion has called. The only problem with that was I never asked the people who mattered. I cowered and hid in my small corner and watched, hoping my chance would pass so that I would not have to risk being caught on a weak limb waiting to break and fall. I fled from opportunity unlike the wise who would pursue it. Does my cowardliness out weigh my wisdom, i think not. My problem lies with my thoughts meeting my passions. My thoughts defend me while my actions accuse me. I know what others might say but choose not to act, this problem above all others defines the human failure to Love God.

This past week I spent much time with friends, three great people. We worked our way through one of my favorite books in the Bible, Philippians. I am not sure if you have ever read this short book of four chapters, but one thing I do know; you must! The language seems different from all of his other books, I think maybe because Paul never wanes in one area of his life, that being passion. His passion screams from his wording, his phrases, how he demonstrates a continual devotion to God even though suffering much, while in chains. He suffers because of the gospel, he lives it, breathes it and never takes his eye off that Goal, the one thing he lives for and in death reaches, and the goal’s name is Christ. In the study I got to see something, something I had not seen before, the passion of a brother who has found purpose in his faith, a kind of newly birthed passion. I got to see the pain of another brother, the turmoil that fills his family’s life and the strength he has to hold them together. I witnessed the friendship of a sister whose passion never ceases to amaze me and her Love for God and his creation is truly inspiring. The one thing I have yet to share with you about love is passion.

Love requires a kind of passion, one not easily attained and harder to toss aside. Passion will overlook the evil and the difficulties. Passion will create endurance and with endurance, strength. Here you may begin to question my words; what if I told you Love was a sort of suffering. I believe it. People always associate suffering with the terrible parts of life such as illness, loss of a job, death of a relative or friend. What people seem to be blind to is that those sufferings make them stronger, especially for the Christians. The suffering of Love strengthens you. One thing is true, happiness comes and goes like the tide, but when you choose to remain strong in Love your suffering adds to your passion so you begin to live off of the suffering for you know what great things it leads love to. Love does not hinge on the emotion of happiness, but rejoices with the continual obedience to live for the love you will. My point is love will not always include fun or happiness, but that because you suffer through the times when it brings hardships, love abounds all the more. Those who give up can never understand the true suffering of Love. C.S. Lewis once said that those who give into temptation are the weak because they had not the strength to survive through the temptation. They gave in only after five minutes so really the bad people had no idea about the strength of temptation. Well the bad or the weak are the ones who gave in only after five minutes not becoming stronger by this suffering of Love failing to grasp its supreme power as well as beauty. Cowering in the corner afraid of that weak limb to crawl out on, there the bad people sit and forever wait praying their opportunity doesn't see them.

Passion comes from the suffering; those who suffer have passion that grows. I think maybe I give into the suffering and because of that I wave each opportunity by never quite knowing the true passion I could have. Now I am not talking about my Bond with God, I want that made clear, also my family and friendships are all in tact doing great. So what is left? Perhaps the passion to seek what my heart desires and longs for, to meet another to suffer with.

Tonight I shall begin a prayer, a prayer for the strength to suffer through Love so I have a new source of passion, the kind that builds only with every passing hardship. And here I conclude what I call Love; no matter how many words I throw at it, they all seem pointless. After all, Love is indescribable. ;-)

-Jonny Heart

1 comment:

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Quotes from my Senior Patron

-Clive Staples Lewis-

"The Love of knowledge is a kind of madness."

The Problem of Pain

"We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which he will not be satisfied until it has a certain character."

Mere Christianity - (Pg. 31)

"This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies."

The Problem of Pain - C.S. Lewis (Pg. 31)

"What would really satisfy us would be a God who said anything we happened to like doing, what does it matter so long as they are contented? We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven - a senile benevolence who, as they say, liked to see young people enjoying themselves, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, a good time was had by all."

"If we wish to be rational, not now and then, but constantly, we must pray for the fit of faith, for the power to go on believing not in the teeth of reason but in the teeth of lust and terror and jealousy and boredom and indifference that which reason, authority, or experience, or all three, have once delivered to us for truth."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 139-140)

"It is not reason that takes away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other... Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your ganging moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know by experience..."

A Grief Observed - (P.g. 9-10)

"I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 7)

"It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 32)

"In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth-only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 56-57)

"Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something mush harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person-and he would not need it."