PRONE TO SABOTAGING LOVE

For the longest time, the thought that love is hard and that it is an impossible pursuit has been frequently recorded in my mind. Granted I know it is beautiful, I love to love and I am a supporter of love as I see it all around me, and on paper, the idea of it is everything my heart yearns for and yet it has always been scary to face. I used to see love as unattainable and inconsistent should it dare be found by you or if it finds you. Have I been in love? I think I have been, from what I at least knew love to be but even still I often battled with talking myself out of it.

Sometimes, like Gomer, I am a woman who will sabotage love and any chance of it should it dare make entry. Hers is a story that is too overwhelming to even think about. Often my reasons are just because I feel insecure or that perhaps I feel the person is deserving and well-suited to a different and better candidate but Gomer? She had a permanent spot reserved for her in the “streets” and she had been exposed to a life where her worth was crushed and trampled upon. I imagine it had become her new normal and maybe she was okay with it. Then comes a man, Hosea, who by instruction from the Most High God is to be her man when she had never called a man “mine”. He swoops with the intention of giving her a sense of belonging yet she had never known what it was to belong to one man

You can know how to love but sometimes being loved is the hardest, accepting the love you’re given takes all of you.

Gomer wildly agrees to the union, and three babies are added to the family. But does she stay faithful or does her feeling of unworthiness still pull her back to the mud like we so often draw back because we believe God can’t possibly love us after all the mess we have made? The book of Hosea is a demonstration, a powerful symbol of the relentless, ridiculous love that God has for the Israelites and us today. God is the faithful husband while the Israelites, like us, are more often than not easily given to promiscuity. This book details an enactment of this powerful message of God to His people and to me, more than anything else it is the clearest picture of God’s pursuit of me.

How could Hosea, a prophet marry and love Gomer, a prostitute?
How could God, righteous and holy love unrighteousness, and sinful people like us?
How could He give up His only son for a sinful people?

Unfathomable love; is the kind of love that beats all logic and the best thing our instinct tells us to do is to resist it. But how can you resist a love that keeps chasing and blowing you away? How can you stand a chance against the waves of love that drive forcefully against the currents of your denial? The tug of war in our minds in denying this unfathomable love makes us go back to the lesser loves; false and unsatisfactory. In Hosea 2:5 “I will run after other lovers…” Jeremiah 2:13 also echoes “they hewn cisterns that can’t hold water.”

I am wrecked by God’s love. It is the kind of love that can never make sense and I am coming to terms with it. Jeremiah 31:3 says “I have loved you with an everlasting love” and Romans 8:38-39 says “Nothing can separate us from God’s love.” MaryAnne George in Hymn of Ages sings “I’m prone to wander and you’re prone to chase.” and every time this line has made me ball my eyes out. How can He love me so greatly to chase after me with my divided heart?

The greatest breakthrough for any Christian happens when they have fully settled and are assured of the love of God. An understanding of this love, though too great to comprehend allows us to bid goodbye to the darkness of our past messy lives and the guilt that may be attached to it. No wonder Paul prays in Ephesians 3:18 “May you have the power to understand, as all people should how wide, how long, how high and how deep his love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.”

During this month of love, whether you spend it with your significant other, your friends, your family, or even alone, may the truth of how you are fiercely loved and pursued by God be a constant thought. Of all kinds of love, this will forever be marked as the greatest expression of love.

You are light and you are so loved.