We live in a world of against-all-odds love stories with happy endings tied up in pretty little bows, but love ain’t pretty. Not real love anyway. Real love suffers long. Real love is vulnerable and uncomfortable. It is, at best, inconvenient. To show real love we have to let our heart hurt for another, even when there is no hope of hope. That is the kind of love that I try to live in. Not because it is fun; not because it gives me some warm fuzzy feeling inside, but because I know what it is like to have someone let their heart hurt for me when there was no hope of hope, and it saved my life.
I have this amazing life with a beautiful family and a respectable career. I have a couple of degrees and a decent reputation, but that is who I became, not who I was. There were many years in my life when I knew, as sure as I knew the sun was coming up tomorrow, that I would end badly. I was destined to disappoint everyone that ever loved me and the most generous thing I could possibly do was to keep people at a distance.
“Don’t let them think I will do anything but fail because the second they do, I will.”
It was the the closest thing to Hell I can imagine: to be so certain of the immensity of my own damage that I could not imagine being restored, much less redeemed. Regardless of my own sense of personal doom, people continued to love me. They sat by my hospital bed praying, they brought me food and pretended not to know what I spent all my food money on, they opened themselves up to be hurt and disappointed and taken advantage of over and over and over again. They spent themselves on my behalf. Not their money, although that was sometimes part of it; not their possessions, although that was also sometimes part of it; they spent themselves. They loved me. And that love is what redeemed me. For anyone like me, who follows Jesus, you know that my redemption came from God- there can be no denying that. But it was His relentless, foolish, inconvenient love that I was shown through people that did it. It brought me back to life and gave me the hope of hope. It restored me and enabled me to spend my life seeking to do the same for others. It more than restored me, it redeemed me. But that is the thing about real love. It isn’t depleted and restored, it is always redeemed.
A buddy of mine (Atlanticcity Crustkings) recently made this video. This is what it looks like to spend yourself on behalf of another, to show real love. This is what it looks like when love is redeemed: people showing up to help someone else even when there was nothing in it for them. I couldn’t help but be reminded that we are all in this thing together. That it is on me to love the one in front of me, even when it doesn’t seem to make sense and it doesn’t play out pretty; when there is no happy ending. Because real love isn’t about the ending, it’s about how you get there. So if you want to get a snapshot of what it looks like to spend yourself on behalf of another, check this out (warning- the language is a little rough):