Let me love you …

 

When this voice whispers into my heart, it is terrifying! It is unraveling and uncomfortable…

With hundreds of thoughts, all constantly vying for attention, why is it that this thought, this one thing, keeps making its way towards the center? Let me love you.

God, You are asking me to give You permission to love me the way You long to love me. The truth is I feel vulnerable, exposed, without defense and running scared. They are uncomfortable thoughts that I want to push away, back to the inside of me where I have a locked gate with a sign that reads, ‘Do not open! Dangerous emotional territory.’ Yet on a particular day, I found myself letting these thoughts have their voice, and I allowed my mind to wander – to consider this love – that You love me deeply, perfectly, absolutely!

Perhaps, I am beginning, but merely beginning, to get a handle on what Your love for me means. But this is the revelation: Your love for me is terrifying! It’s the next step. You want me to let You love me. Your love is a Perfect Love, exactly what I need. It is without any of the fault and failings that I experience through human love – betrayal, unmet expectations, misunderstood, used, abused, taken for granted, absent, unworthy, unfaithful, untrustworthy – the list is so long. The best of human love cannot completely fulfill or satisfy, and often falls short.

Though to feel loved by someone is a safe, beautiful place to be, it can change in an instant –

death, illness, any traumatic or dramatic change of events can alter that bliss of being loved and can plunge us into a dark and insecure place.

Many have never experienced any real love at all. The love they have known has been abusive or controlling, conditional or demanding, and it’s made love in that person’s life, a negative thing – yet powerfully lived out as the way love is received and given. It’s a disillusioned, misguided, warped, all-I’ve-ever-known, must be what love is, kind of thing, because its what has been taught and experienced. To be loved this way is an unsafe, insecure, fearful, untrusting, held back, shut up, chained, walls high, don’t get hurt, kind of life and thinking.

  

Let me Love you and I will Love you. When this voice whispers into my heart, it is therefore terrifying! It is unraveling and uncomfortable. It demands vulnerability. It raises all my fears and my past, my hurts and unwanted shutdown tight emotions, and it asks me to open myself to a dangerous place.

You loving me, and me letting You love me, are incompatible notions competing with my heart. Oh! I can understand some of that You love me deeply, absolutely and perfectly, but for me to let You love me is a different story. I feel exposed, open to something so strange, yet so powerful –

Could it be the one thing that my heart both desperately longs for and fearfully hides away from?

What could this love do for me? I fear that it would satisfy me completely, fill me up like I long to be filled, secure me when I am unstable and unsafe, make me feel I belong, find in me – an often ugly, selfish, broken, ruined person – someone to be delighted in, invite me into intimacy, desire my company, see in me worth, show me honour and respect, trust me, treasure me, love me unconditionally, is OK with who I am even when I’m not, will love unchangingly when I fail or stuff up, will heal all those broken parts of me. Why then would I fear this?

To allow the unraveling of a carefully constructed fortress protecting my heart from hurt, in order for Love to be permitted in, requires a complete undoing.

Fear holds me together. Fear is protection. Fear is self-preservation. Fear is my survival method for this life. Fear is how I negotiate my day-to-day existence. Fear is my closest ally, my best friend. It is on hand, poised and ready at all times, to accompany me into any situation. What am I without fear? It courses through the neurons in my brain, runs through the blood in my veins, is who I am. Yet You want to take fear – the very thing that keeps me together – and recreate me with Love.

It is said there is no fear in love (1 John 4:17-18, NIV). Love and fear compete, they are incompatible, there is no room in love for fear, and equally no room in fear for love. To let love rebuild me is to give up on fear. “The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking” (Albert Einstein). My world is created with fear as its foundation, its bricks, its mortar. Its how I think, and how I do life. Therefore, what you ask is a complete undoing of me. And my response? Fear! I would have to change my thinking, an entire lifetime of thoughts that have made me, me. Though fear is crippling, its what I know. Though love is redeeming, it is foreign and requires the dismantling of the carefully constructed person I am.

There is a warped kind of safety in knowing that human love will fail. We are comfortable with broken love because it is familiar. Though we might desire Perfect Love, we don’t know how to handle it or receive it. Your love is, therefore, Perfectly! Absolutely! Deeply! Wonderfully! … Terrifying!

I was designed for love, birthed out of Your love, but I have known only fear and betrayal. I cannot comprehend a completely safe love, because all loves here have failed to be that Perfect Love. All loves I have known, though there is a certain sweetness for a time, have eventually disappointed or disillusioned me. I am terrified of love. I am terrified of opening myself to the vulnerability of allowing someone to love me. And even though I am learning that You would never use me or mistreat me, this truth has failed to yet allow me to give myself permission to let it in. In my mind, I hear and am enticed by Your words, “perfect love drives out fear” (1 John 4:18, NIV), but further in, deep inside, I am terrified of allowing that Perfect Love to love me. All other loves have damaged me too greatly to let me consider it or to place my hope in.

And yet…it still entices. It still pulls at my heart and my emotions and my entire being…Let Me love you…and I will love you. It entices because perhaps it is home. That place of…this is where I belong. This is what my heart has longed for. I am in turmoil. A terrified, dare I hope, turmoil.

It’s in this conflicting state of mind that is this journey of love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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