L-O-V-E

I was listening to some Rob Bell literature on my Ipod while working out today and he was talking about the vulnerability of loving someone...of putting yourself out there to be loved back. He told a story about when he was in junior high. He was at a school dance and mustered up enough courage to cross the gymnasium floor from the boy's side to the girl's side. He said he approached a girl who's name he can still vividly recall and asked her to dance. Her reaction: She began crying and ran into the girl's bathroom.
In this awkward moment of not knowing quite what was going on, he had been rejected. He put himself out there and was shot down.
He then begins to explain how God, who is often portrayed as a judge and king is also a lover and that when he created human beings, He made the same decision to be vulnerable....to create beings with a mind of their own who could choose to love him...and time and time and time again, they choose not to.
Rejection. Not only can God comfort you when you are rejected...He can relate to a much higher degree.
God's word tells us (wives) to submit to our husbands and for husbands to love their wives as Christ loves the church.
What did Christ do for the church? He died for it...God created human beings to be worth dying for. When a police officer takes a bullet for someone or a fire fighter dies in a smoke filled building after saving several lives from flames, our hearts are deeply touched and we honor their memory because we know, as the beings that God created us to be, that human beings are worth dying for...and when someone lays down their life for another (which the bible calls the ultimate gift), we are moved and effected, whether we know that person or not.
In this same way, God has called husbands to die to themselves, to lay down their lives so that they can truly and intensely love their wives....and yet the words, 'Wives submit to your husbands' is so often quoted, taken out of context, and even used in abusive situations to bully and gain control over women.
Real men love their wives to the point where they are completely submissive to them through self - sacrifice and real women reciprocate.
Marital love is not about sex or romance or butterflies in the stomach ... it's about two people becoming completely selfless, dying to self and uplifting the other in every way imaginable.
The woman in Song of Song's said, "I am my beloved's and he is mine."
Equality. Respect. Submission. Selflessness. Love.
Real love is worth risking heart break for. God does it every single moment of every single day. God is love but the majority of the people he has created choose to have nothing to do with him...Can you imagine how much that hurts the one who created them to be?
I once heard that having a child is like having your heart walking around outside of your body. It's painful and exhilarating all at once. That is love...and it's worth fighting for...it's worth pouring into...when Caden was an infant, he didn't have the capability of loving me back and yet I poured myself into him, nurturing him, taking care of him and loving him beyond explanation...I just loved him for being him and as he grew and developed, he began to love me too....my love for him made his love for me, natural.
That's the choice we need to make in marriage...to love our spouse for who they are, not for what they can do for us...otherwise we'll begin creating a list of rights and wrongs, whether we intend to or not. Real love is contagious and it always prevails...and in the event that you love someone with all of yourself and they do not return that love, know that your Father in Heaven can relate and believe that love is still worth searching for, praying for, waiting for, longing for, working for and even dying for.