Love Really Is All About Money

I've been reading this book by Donald Miller, "Blue Like Jazz." It's helping me put into words random thoughts and ideas that have been aimlessly floating around in my head for years. Anyway, he points out that Christians tend to use the metaphor of economics for the concept of love. Now that is revolutionary! We earn love, we lose love, we invest in others, we make withdraws from the relationship, etc. Before I share with you how this all plays into my ever evolving understanding of unconditional love, you need to know a bit of my background.
A few random thoughts, soon to be all tied together:
#1. In the past, when it came to money, I believed that there was always a right and wrong way to spend it. Not only was there a right and wrong, but there was always a best way for the limited amount of cash that I had to be invested. Therefore, I shuddered at the thought of waisting money, and I rarely, if ever, spent money on myself because that was obviously a waste.
#2. In the past, I have applied this same view to life decisions. Now, yes, this was a bit obsessive compulsive, but every decision, big or small, every action, every interaction, was judged as a success or failure. There was alway the "best" decision, action, word to be said, etc. and if I fell short of that standard, then I had failed. There was no middle ground. No, I had either succeeded or failed at hundreds of things everyday. Imagine living under that pressure, compounded with the belief that love was reserved only for those who succeed at life. Yes, it was a living hell! And, to think I created it for myself, hmmm...
#3. A year ago, God spoke very clearly to me and told me that life is not about succeeding or failing. He doesn't have a grading system, and I do not need to stress about getting all As. He said that He looks at our lives as a journey and it doesn't matter so much what we do along the journey of life as it does what we learn and who we become in the process.
Okay, so all of that is spinning around and I realize that, yes, I have loved myself and others using the metaphor of economics. My very strict thinking about money and life caused this metaphor to be quite rigid. If I am to be deserving of love than I must be worth the investment and if others are to be deserving of my love than they better be worth my investment as well. Wow! Now if that doesn't scare you, I don't know what will!
Scary thing is, I recently realized that I invested years of love in someone who was incapable of loving me in a healthy way in return. Now, we have all probably made that mistake at various times in our lives, but I allowed this person to ruin all of my other love relationships. I willingly gave this person all of my love and in the process retracted the love I had invested into so many other relationships (because they couldn't support me in this particular relationship). For a while, I thought things were working out alright. Then, I started to have my own thoughts, opinions, ideas that didn't match up with his. I started to expect certain things in the relationship, then, my most brutal of all actions, I set a boundary and kept it. Now, the relationship is most likely going to end in divorce and I have the forever embedded stigma of "Divorcee" etched across my face. Can we say, "Failure"? Yes, there is no way around that one. Not only did I not succeed in my marriage, but yes, folks, my marriage failed.
So, I have had to face loving myself knowing that by my standards I am a failure. Can I love myself unconditionally, or do I declare my account bankrupt? Recognizing my personal reaction to my own marriage, or lack there of, have i been mistakenly hypocritical in thinking that I haven't been placing this same standard on all the other people I know whose marriages ended in a less than perfect way?
Once again, I come to the conclusion that I am incapable of giving to others a love that I cannot give to or receive for myself.

Love your neighbor as you love yourself

Have you ever wondered at Jesus' command to "Love your neighbor as you love yourself." Wow, my poor neighbors would be in big trouble if I actually attempted to take that statement literally! Yet, in some ways, it is a delusion to think that I haven’t been loving them this way all along.
I've spent several months processing the possibility to which unconditional love could really exist. For the most part, I concluded that it is more or less an illusion destroyed by our selfish natures and the expectations that we inevitably place on those we attempt to love unconditionally.
Then, out of no where, (not really, a classmate of mine actually brought it up in regards to something completely unrelated) the Lord reminded me of this command, "Love your neighbor as you love yourself." I began to wonder if it was possible to love myself unconditionally. Just entertaining this thought caused me to recognize the huge list of expectations that I have for myself. Ouch! If I cannot love myself without expectations, how can I possibly think that I can love others without expectations? Most significantly, how can I believe that God, or anyone else, could love me without expectations?
So, I have decided to focus on a new mission. Part of me screams, this is simply caving in to your own selfish nature, but I’ve found that in the Kingdom of God, most of the time you need to do the opposite of what seems logical. So, instead of continuing to struggle with learning how to love others, I have decided to learn how to love myself. I’ve decided to begin validating my own needs, my own thoughts, my own desires. Maybe I’ll start to give myself a little credit every now and then. I’m going to start asking the Lord to help me love myself, because right now I cannot even receive His love until I recognize that I can be loved. I think that if we are really honest, we recognize that our entire template for love flows out of how we love ourselves. Yes, I know that we should allow God’s love to be the foundation of our understanding of love, but our personal template, how we love ourselves, so significantly impacts the way we view God’s love that the two cannot be mutually exclusive. I know that God’s love is perfect, and I’ll be attempting to love myself with this perfect love, but I don’t think that I can actually receive this perfect love until I begin to believe that despite my failure to live up to the myriad of expectations I have for myself I am still lovable. We’ll see how this all plays out…

The Truth Behind Unconditional Love

So, I've been doing a lot of thinking. What is love? What is it about love that we think will solve all of our problems? Why do we live our entire lives seeking, hoping, wishing, and longing for true love? And why is it when we think that we may have found it, it slips just beyond our reach?
Well, I've come to believe, at least temporarily, that unconditional love doesn't really exist. And, isn't that what we are all really looking for? Sure, we can find love. We all know how to play the game well enough. We adapt to what we realize is expected and boom there it is "love". Unfortunately, we cannot really receive the love, at least we cannot fully trust it, because we know deep down we are only playing the game. Would that love really be there if the other person actually knew the real person beneath the facade?
Right, I can't even love the real person underneath the persona that I hide behind, so how could someone else? If I constantly run and hide from that little shadow that tries to rear its ugly head, how could I even dare to risk letting someone else know it is there?
Who really cares anyway, because even that "love" that we think we have won through playing our cards just right, that too, can so quickly be retracted.
All of this great wisdom, I received from my parents. Wow! I learned the game quite well. Their perfect little angel, graduating Val Victorian of my class, now how's that for impressive? But, no, I wasn't just a nerd; I was also a musician and a pretty damn good athlete as well. Oh, did I mention that I was notorious in my community for preaching at local churches? Yes, the model teenager. I made every other parent despise their rebellious sons and daughters as they longed to know my parent's secret. At the time, I was naively unaware of the game I had been born into. Play your cards just right and here is the love, baby! Make a wrong play and ouch you’re on your own. Unfortunately, fortunately, depends how you look at it, but I didn't figure out the severity of the game until college. Then, sin of all sins, I decided upon a slightly different career path from the one carved out by my parents. God forbid! I was traveling down the path of Benny Hinn, not Billy Graham. “Call the prayer lines, folks, start casting out demons, our daughter is possessed! We handed her a perfect life on a silver platter and she didn't want it. How dare she!”
This "rebellion" resulted in threats of every shape and color. Good bye tuition money, good bye home, good bye love. Yes, good bye love.
How devastating to think that you were being loved for 20 years of your life only to find out that one deviant decision could leave you all on your own.
Unconditional love... what is that? We place expectations on those we love, sometimes not to the extreme of my parents, but expectations none the less. We place these expectations and we dish out our love in hopes that these expectations will be fulfilled.
Now, some of us are more patient than others, believing in the “ministry of transforming love.” "I'm going to love them no matter what" we tell ourselves. What we really mean is "I'm going to love them so that they will change and begin to meet my expectations." So we love and wait, love and wait, and eventually we get tired of loving and waiting and not seeing them change, so we withdraw our love.
Yep, I think it comes down to expectations. Is it possible to love without expectations? Are we so self centered that any time we offer love we are also asking, "So, what do I get in return?" When we don't get what we expected, what we hoped for, we withdraw our love.
Is it no wonder we hide behind personas? We know that even playing the game is risky business, destined to take a wrong turn, even if it is twenty years down the road. Even when we try with everything in us to meet that special person's expectations in hopes of receiving that idealized unconditional love, we will eventually fall short. They will eventually get frustrated because we cannot meet their expectations and slowly, but yes, quite surely, their love is once again withdrawn.
So, the truth behind unconditional love is that there is no truth there. Does it really exist? Can it really exist? A part of me, the romantic, the dreamer, still hangs on with every ounce of hope I can muster, thinking that it may be out there, somewhere... The cynic, the realist inside of me, recognizes that the core of who we are is selfish and self serving. Until this core is transformed, by some yet to be realized miracle, love with out expectations, without conditions is virtually impossible.