Love Like Jazz

August 7, 2007

Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
Sugar is sweet.
And so are you!

What a poem of childhood and love! I would guess that most people in America know this poem by heart. I just read a chapter in a book I am reading during my devotional time. This most recent chapter in Blue Like Jazz was about love. I guess the topic of love and the color blue made this silly poem pop right back into my head!

Love. What does it mean anyway? I heard that there are seven different words in Greek for our one word, love. I guess that is why we have to say things like “I love ice cream!” and “I love you, Sarah!” using the same word! I think that the English language has cheated us in this regard. I “googled” the Greek words for love and found a couple of interesting ones.

The word Philia is brotherly love…hence the city name, Philidelphia. This is the love we feel for our best friend or that person who went an extra mile for us. I love a lot of people with that word. Storge is the love we feel within our family. I love Kenna and Hanna, my daughters in ways I have never loved before. There are less people that I love in this way, mostly because my family and extended family isn’t large like some of yours might be. Eros is that love they so often depict on TV…boyfriend and girlfriend love…husband and wife love. This is the love that so often gets us in trouble. It is also the love we use as a drug to mask our feelings of self-hatred and low self-esteem. We try to get that special someone to love us, no matter what it costs us, hoping for an abundant and overflowing type of love only found in the love of God and through God’s love in others. Let me share a paragraph from Blue like Jazz that struck me. Miller writes,

And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it. I think apart from the idea that I am a sinner and God forgives me, this is the greatest lesson I have ever learned. When you get it, it changes you. My friend Julie from Seattle told me that the main prayer she prays for her husband is that he will e able to receive love. And this is the prayer I pray for all my friends because it is the key to happiness. God’s love will never change us if we don’t accept it.
(Donald Miller in Blue Like Jazz, page 232)

When have I refused to receive love? I know that I have spent a good part of my growing up life rejecting that love from my Creator. I was too unlovable, too ugly, too dumb, too everything to be loved by someone like God. I didn’t love myself. How could God ever love me? That is just our mistake though, isn’t it? We forget that God knows our insides and our outsides. In Psalm 139 it says, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.” We cannot escape that God knows us…all the good and all the bad. Why do we let our imaginations get away with ourselves? Why do we think that what we have done is so bad that God will not love and forgive us?

In 1 John 3:18-20, the author writes, “Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.” Let us not just love ourselves with words, let’s do the hardest thing…receive love from the one who loved us first and loved us best. Let us confess all that we do and not keep that sin in our hearts thinking that God cannot see it. Let us live with the strength of God, knowing that God knows us, the real us, and still loves us deeply! God loves us with Agape love. This love is the most used word in the bible for Christian love. Agape love is unconditional, sacrificial, abundant, and amazing love! We are called to spread that kind of love around! What does this crazy, over-the-top abundant love allow us to do as Christians?

Agape love, over-the-top love, allows us to talk to someone who has hurt our feelings rather than the usual human way of talking badly about the person behind their back. Agape love, over-the-top love, allows us to open our church to the homeless during Interfaith Hospitality Network week. Agape love, over-the-top love, allows us to pray for our enemies. Agape love, over-the-top love, allows us to send our dear children to Poland to spread the gospel to those who may not have heard it or experienced it. Agape love, over-the-top love, allows us to rake pine straw at Hope House when most teenagers would rather be home watching TV. Agape love, over-the-top love, allows us to build a building out back, which will be a place to do ministry long after we are taking our dirt nap. Agape love, over-the-top love, allows us to tithe knowing that money belongs not to us but to God. Agape love, over-the-top love, is some amazing stuff!

If you haven’t experienced that agape, over-the-top love, I invite you to open your heart to God. Being humble enough to receive God’s love and God’s love through others is difficult but worth it! I invite you to let God love you. I invite you to let others love you! We do! You will gain the inner strength only found in God’s love and the love God enables in other people. Be brave and let God in!

I love you! God loves you!

Peace out,
Mary

Gracious and ever loving Lord, I invite you into my heart yet again to love me. Enable me to receive and embrace this love you give to me every day. Let me live like I am loved. Let me love others in your name. Let me be a vessel of that abundant, crazy, over-the-top agape love. In the name of our Love, Jesus, I pray. Amen.