This is the story of my journey into Love …
For the sake of this blog, if you were to ask who I am, my answer would be, loved. So loved. Loved beyond imagination. It has become my life journey, to give myself permission to be loved and to enter into its depths … I’m not very good at giving Love permission, I have too many barriers.
But, what if there were a perfect love? what if it were all I need? why is it I cannot receive it? why would I protect myself from it? what if I could say yes to, “Let me love you, and I will love you.”
I have entered a journey, and I invite you, I dare* you
– to enter and engage in the journey of love
– to explore its pain, its barriers, its vulnerability, its beauty, it’s healing, its perfection. All of it!
– to question your own defiant exclamation of, “don’t you dare love me!”
– to give LOVE permission to love
What if you fell in LOVE here? That’s what I did. It’s what I am doing.
My story has been intertwined and influenced greatly by my girl friends. Their private pain opened my eyes to my own desperate need for love and the walls I have barricaded my own heart with. And so I entered a journey …
I wish I had written Redeeming Love, Francine Rivers’ novel, and that it was my work; that God had given me the ability and the story to write it. The Redeeming Love in this book touches me so deeply and intimately in many ways. Redeeming Love explains so fully in story form what I am trying to express in my thoughts and here in my journal about the Perfect Love of God, and I so wish it had been my story. But I’m not a novelist, though maybe I can write to some extent.
I have so much to say and write down about God’s Love and how powerfully, terrifying, redeeming it is, but I don’t know how to give it adequate description with the depth of words and feeling required to convey it.
I feel like if I could, it could help the ones I am always drawn to, the ones who hurt the most, the ones who live as survivors, the ones who need it desperately. It could also help me – needy for love.
The reading of Redeeming Love would always take me back to the book of the Old Testament from where it was inspired, Hosea. A surface reading of this book seemed to always fall short of Francine Rivers’ telling of it in novel form, and so I’d usually get a little disappointed, and give up … except this time. This time, God has me in a place to hear some things from this book that are changing my life, destroying my soul, rebuilding it again.
It is the story of the heart of a grieving Lover. In a passionately poignant parable, God asks a man, Hosea, to love Gomer, a prostitute, “love her as the LORD loves”. Gomer’s heart response to this love is a defiant cry, “Don’t you dare love me!” Hosea is a picture of God. He is the Perfect Lover. Gomer is a picture of humanity.
Why would a perfect, satisfying, pure love be deemed so terrifying that we would turn our heels and run, with the same defiant cry, “Don’t you dare love me?”
Don’t You Dare Love Me is my journey into what God has had for me to learn about Himself, about His Love and about the pain of a Perfect Love for a broken, unfaithful, scared-of-Love, humanity. It is, if you like, partly a study in the book of Hosea, though you may not read my rendering of it as a theological study – I am not a theologian, rather a journaler.
I have been told that my style of writing is called, ‘stream of consciousness’ – a literary style that attempts to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings, which pass through the mind. Thoughts, feelings, and reactions which are a continuous flow uninterrupted by objective description or conventional dialogue, so the definition goes. This makes me laugh. It is so me! I didn’t realize I was a ‘literary style’. If I were to describe my journaling, it would be exactly this. I give it my own vivid description –
I write to try and elucidate my thinking. It’s a barrage of thoughts, emotions, ideas, beliefs, circumstances, philosophies, all pushing their way forward in gushing force, like a river bursting it’s banks, as if having been confined too long – and all at once, now expressing itself in a rush of emotional release from the inside of me to the outside. There is no gentle stream here. My head is full of millions of thoughts, not unlike pac-man, all snapping at each other: what if? What about? Why? Have you thought of this? What about this thing? What did she say? What did he say? How did that make you feel? What is true? What is false? What is best? What is fact here? Do you want this, or do you want that? Each with a voice: all eager to have their voice, but none having a single clarity of thought on their own. And in a way, I don’t really know where I am going to land until it is on the page. But once written, there is clarity and a measure of calmness within – my mind is clear, my heart is safe – until the next thing.
These posts are my journal entries – reflections, contemplations, rushing rivers of thought, and experiences – over the course of months and years, extending back to the past where God began to speak, and in turn where my heart began to break, like His, over the ruin of humanity, and over a love given, but rejected.
You could choose to join in at any part of this blog, but I find a journey is best started at the beginning. This is my journey. It could be yours too.
*”May you come to know how wide, how long, how high, and how deep God’s love for you really is, that you be filled up with the fullness of God…who is able to accomplish infinitely more than we would ever dare to ask or imagine!” (Ephesians 3:20)