Chapel Talk number two, from my time at Greenville College

I wrote about love a couple times, and spoke on it, in the early aughts. So, as I am working industriously on The Book of Love, I thought I'd share some selections from those two talks. They are addresses to students at a Christian college, so they do talk about God a lot. (And use the masculine pronoun, something I would no longer do.) If those things would not please you, take a pass. I'll be posting more art in the next week or so.

This one is from 2005, and is on friendship, and the benefits of unrequited romantic desire.

....Friendship is a place where we see Jesus because, like marriage and unlike family, it is a place where we choose to act lovingly, rather than being required or obligated to love. We can choose to make our friends part of our family. We can choose to be obligated and responsible to them, to maintain relationships even when we live in different places or choose different paths. We can adopt our friends as God adopted us, made us His children. We are imitators of Christ in making lasting friendships.

My ideas about this come out of my experience as well as from conviction. I have many close friends, and they are the delight of my heart. I want to talk about one friendship in particular, my best friend Carolyn.

I have known Carolyn for 17 years, almost as long as some of you have been alive. We became friends in college, and hit it off right away. We clicked; there was chemistry, sparks, etc. In the first few years of our friendship, we often used the language of romantic love to describe our relationship – we would talk about how happy we were to know each other, describe one another as best beloved, and speak of how we felt God’s love through this relationship. It was a place where we learned to receive the delight of another person. In our friendship, we have seen Jesus’ love made manifest – God’s love that is spontaneous and joyful, that declares, “Best beloved, how glad I am to see you!”

Like an old married couple, we are not as effusive anymore. We don’t gush. But often when I call, I hear the delight in Carolyn’s voice; she is so glad to talk to me! I love to see her address in my incoming email list. When we visit each other, we chatter excitedly, we stay close together, following one another from room to room as I unpack or she does the dishes. Her friendship over 17 years has made me more hopeful and believing – knowing her makes me a better friend because love has an overflowing quality. It spills out onto other people; it can’t be contained. It embraces widely, even if it starts with the love between just two. I will tell you – that is how you know its real. It radiates out and makes you more generous, makes you more godly. Keep your eye out for that.

You can see that I am not opposed to romantic love; I like its language. I just want to point out that it is not confined to relationships that have or could have a sexual expression. It is not confined to dating or marriage. Romance, in the sense of a delight in the beloved, is all around us. It is in the love of parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. It is in the love of children for their siblings and friends. It is often the feeling that allows us to do difficult or risky things, to extend ourselves. It can soften our heart to be more generous with people who are harder for us to love, about whom we have more prickly feelings or with whom we are generally more sparing in our love. Romance is what gives us a kick-start. It’s the training wheels, helping us get rolling. Remember, love bears all things – loss, betrayal, loneliness, death. We are weak, and we need the hoping and believing of love to be affirmed for us, to give us strength for the hard parts. How generous God is with us! God does not make us wait for a marriage partner to bring love into our lives!

Which leads me to my next point. If friendships are a place to learn to hope all things and believe all things – to experience the delights of love, and see hope returned, fulfilled, where can we learn to endure all things and bear all things? Of course we can learn that in friendship – any place where we love and give our hearts can be a place where our hearts are broken, or we break someone else’s heart, or go through painful times with another person. My friend Carolyn and I have had some terrible fights over the last two decades. But I want you to think about the last time you felt betrayed in a relationship. Think about the last time your felt frustrated. What was it like? When did you last feel disappointed?

One of the places we feel loss most keenly is in romantic relationships, whether because they are going the way they almost always go, which is messily, or because they are going very badly, or because they are not going anywhere at all. We feel the disappointment of unrequited love so deeply. We feel the pain of romantic betrayal or loss like a punch in the gut, a stab in the chest, a weight that will not let us walk, a fog that seems endless. The pain of it seems eternal and hopeless.

So I want to offer this up as another place, besides marriage, where we learn to love. I think we can learn to bear all things and endure all things in unrequited love and in romantic relationships that fail.

I don’t want to suggest that we all become relational masochists. Instead, I want us to be a little like Hosea, and therefore, a little like God. Why does God tell Hosea to marry a woman who is a prostitute? Not the noble, unlucky Julia Roberts. A really broken woman who is persistent in her harlotry. God wants Hosea to live out God’s own love for us. God is the ultimate unrequited lover. He is the ultimate besotted, devoted lover who is constantly spurned. When you are denied the joy of your love being returned in like manner, you are close to God’s heart.

I am not drawing a straight line between Hosea and us. Again, I am not saying that we should be martyrs in love. But I want us to see our longings and desires that go unfulfilled as purposeful, real, a part of life that should not necessarily be avoided. I want us to focus not on the betrayal or the disappointment, but on the joy of delighting in someone. I dearly hope that the people who don’t return your love are not like Gomer, but maybe sometimes they are. More likely, they just don’t feel the same way that you do. The similarity is this – know that your love is valuable even if it is not reciprocated, for whatever reason. Your delight in your beloved is no less valid because this person cannot see you in exactly the same light, or choose to respond to passionate feelings in the same way that you do. Let’s let God be our guide – he loves even when that love is not returned. We may not be able to allure our lovers and give them vineyards, like God does. But we may be able to stretch our hearts in new ways. We may be able to give someone a gift; to know that they are loveable even if they cannot return our love in every way. We can learn that it is possible and even joyful to give without expecting something in return, and that we can be refused and live. We can survive rejection. How wonderful that we keep hoping! How wonderful that we have eyes to see someone’s beauty and loveable qualities! How splendid that our hearts are soft enough to long for connection and intimacy! It is evidence that we are alive. So rather than obsessing, rather than bemoaning our fate, rather than sinking into the pit of despair which is unrequited love, why not focus on the love? Let’s hope for the good of this person we love; pray for them, dream for them, as God dreams for us, even when we reject him. And, if we can, give them the freedom of choosing to be our friend, to extend the love they do have, even if it isn’t the passion that we wish they had.

And when our romances fail, when love is given and then withdrawn, or betrayed, or simply seems to have foundered and disappeared, again we have the opportunity to learn to bear and endure. I do not want to make light of this. The failure of a romance, of a dating relationship, of a marriage, is devastating. It can hollow us out, make us feel hopeless and fearful, broken. How we wish that it never happened! How we long for a paradise where all love is forever, never flagging, never uneven, never disappointing. How we long for a place where our devotion is never betrayed or trampled, never wasted or spit upon. How we long for a place where we are never tempted to betray, where we never are the ones who fail our beloveds, never disappoint, never make mistakes. One day we will be perfect, and love perfectly. And one day we will know in our hearts what is true even now – we are already perfectly loved by God. And imperfectly loved by our friends, our family, our romantic partners, and spouses, even by our exes. Let us press on and learn to receive the love that is given willingly, and delight in it, rather than focusing on what we do not have.

Whatever box we check – married, single, divorced – we are all trying to both give and receive love as God would have us do. We are learning to obey God. I believe that God wants to use all of our relationships to teach us about love in all its endlessness, its terrible persistence.

Jesus is a good model for us as people who desire and love imperfectly. Jesus loved his disciples boldly, fully, and wholly. He made himself their servant without making himself servile. He didn’t abandon his identity to them, but loved them with everything he had. Jesus provides the ultimate model of loving both recklessly and wisely, loving with both abandon and perspective. He will walk with us; we can take his yoke and learn from him. He is gentle and patient; he bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things with us and for us.

Jesus also gives us a model for how to make a family without a marriage partner. Jesus gives a message to his mother and brothers – “Who are my mother and brother and sisters? Those who do God’s will.” In a culture that valued bloodlines, genetic family, Jesus was pretty radical in saying that family was constituted differently. When he gives John to his mother, and his mother to John, he also makes a family in a new way. The story of Ruth also gives us a picture of family that is by choice, by faithfulness, by commitment, not by blood. “Your people will be my people.” We understand this in a marriage vow – without it, there would be no family at all. But what does it mean to say it to your friends, to be as faithful to them as you would be to your spouse, your mother, your father, your brother or sister? Ruth’s mother-in-law knows that she has nothing to offer Ruth, but Ruth’s faithfulness bears fruit both for herself and for Naomi. Think too of Jonathan and David, of Jesus, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, of Jesus and John, of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. It is good to be devoted to your friends, and earnestly desire their good.

If you take anything away from this talk, take this. Learn to love right where you are. Love the friends in your life. Honor the love and desire you feel whether those feelings result in dating and marriage or not. In friendship, in family, in dating, in marriage, in every place that your heart is stirred, be glad and rejoice. You were meant to be in relationship, and God will use it all to teach you to be more like Him. Let your delights in the people around you be evident; don’t wait for True Romance to find delight in the beauty of the people in your life, or to express it. They are God’s presence with you. They are both the place where you learn to love, and the people who will help you to love both wisely and well, with both abandonment and clear-eyed discernment.

For those of us who want to marry, I believe God would love to give us a life partner who will be a help and joy to us. I am confident that God will do everything possible to make that happen, but we are not puppets, nor should we want to marry puppets. No one can guarantee marriage for us, and no one can guarantee that our marriage will go smoothly. Let’s remember -- marriage does not mean a permanent end to loneliness or to disappointment. It involves people, and therefore it will always be imperfect and sometimes painful. It is not salvation.

In the end, I’m not sure that God really cares whether or not we marry. Not because God wants you or me to suffer or be sad – I believe that God hears our cry for intimacy and will answer it. God will have mercy on us, because God’s own being is in relationship.

No, I think that God doesn’t care about whether we marry because love is bigger than marriage, and love is what God is concerned with. And love is with us already, we don’t have to wait for it. Love is what we do for our friends and our family, for the people in our lives now. Love is hoping for another’s good, longing for their good. It is choosing to express admiration, affection, devotion, concern, delight, no matter how clumsily. Love is persisting with one another, walking with one another, and receiving care from one another. You should do it everyday, like brushing your teeth and sleeping. Like exercise. Sometimes it’s effortless, and sometimes it takes an intentional act of will, of discipline. But let us love the LORD our God with the whole of our hearts, the whole of our souls, and the whole of our minds, and love our neighbors as ourselves, seeing them as beloved and delightful, fearfully and wonderfully made. On it depend all the law and the prophets – this is the stuff of life itself.