Tag Archives: God

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Love is Not a Currency

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If I ever write a book, I think it’s going to be called Lies People Tell You. Because there are a lot of them, and it would be easy to come up with new chapters.

There’s a lie out there that says we can run out of love.

That’s not true.

Love is not a currency. Let me repeat that: Love is not a currency.

You can’t run out.

I wrote a post about a week ago about reading I Kissed Dating Goodbye. I have one major problem with the book – the assumption that love is a resource we can waste. In the first chapter, Joshua Harris tells this story about a girl’s nightmare. She’s at the altar on her wedding day and as her husband is saying his vows, all of the girls he’s slept with start walking and standing around them. I’m rather sure love has nothing to do with all of this.

I think the reasoning for this kind of fear comes mostly from Proverbs 4:23, which says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring  of life.” Nowhere does this verse say “guard your heart or else you won’t be able to give it to your future spouse.” But that’s how a lot of us read it. And, certainly, sometimes it feels like that’s what’s true. We fall in love for the first time, and when it ends, it feels like we will never be able to love at that level again. That’s all just faulty reasoning, though.

I think we are supposed to guard our hearts because we are special and valuable, not because our hearts and our love are finite. God wants us to share our specialty and value with people who deserve it, people who have earned it. That makes sense to me.

We have been offered everlasting, infinite love. The least we can do is offer that to others.

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Trusting Authority

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When I was applying to college, my mom made me go talk to people from a really boring small honors college at a university nationally known for being a top party school. I had my sights set on higher things, more studious places. I was going to be a real academic.

But I went, and after my first meeting with the assistant dean at the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University, I knew it was where I needed to be.

A little over three years later, I can’t imagine being anywhere else. Most of who I am today has been dependent on being part of the HTC or being a student at Ohio University. Sometimes, parents really do know what’s best for us.

When someone really cares about us and has more information than we do or a wider world view, they normally make decisions for us that we would make if we had all the information. That’s why I think my failure to not trust God is almost humorous.

God knows infinitely more than me. God cares about me infinitely. Why, then, would God want anything less than the best for me?

Sometimes I perceive God the way I perceived my mom when she was trying to get me to visit Ohio University. God wants me to give up what I really want in order to do something the way God wants it. But that’s not the way it is. God wants to stretch me so that I can consider the kind of options God considers for me.

Jesus said some stuff about this (Matthew 6:25-34):

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you – you of little faith? So do not worry, saying “What shall we eat?” or “What shall we drink?” or “What shall we wear?” For the pagans run after these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

God is going to dress us in clothes brighter than the flowers. We have only to let Her or Him.

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God’s Eternal Relationship

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Surprisingly, I’m incredibly stubborn from time to time. This frustrates my friends to no end because often, we will have long discussions in which I refuse to change my mind about something only to change my mind several days later when I have had time to read, write, and think about the subject in question. That’s why before I write this post, I should apologize to a couple of people who have been trying to tell me the following conclusions for quite some time.

I just finished this book called I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris. The argument of the book is that dating is a broken vehicle for finding real love and romance. I’m still not sold on that whole idea. But I must say that the alternative Harris gives is very very attractive. He says if we actively stay away from dating, if we fill our time with other things glorifying to God, then God will take care of the rest.

A couple of nights ago I had a very long argument with a couple of good friends about this concept, though. If I choose to actively ignore romantic relationships with members of the opposite sex, how am I ever supposed to meet anyone? My friends accused me of not trusting God. I do struggle with trusting God. I struggle with trusting in general. But I can at least intellectually and rationally understand trusting someone or God when their behavior follows the rules of logic.

I can trust God with my career because while I am waiting for it to become obvious what I am supposed to spend the rest of my life doing, I can go to school and learn. And at the end of my time in school, I am going to apply to a bunch of different grad schools and jobs and see where God and life take me. But I don’t think that’s what I am supposed to do with dating.

So I was about half way through Harris’s book; I was thinking about quitting it because I didn’t think I would ever figure out how to properly think about what he was saying; and then I thought about Boethius. Boethius is kind of a strange writer to think about when you are thinking about romantic relationships.

Boethius was pretty wise.

Boethius wrote a book called The Consolation of Philosophy in the 6th century. In it, he gives a pretty famous argument for reconciling free will with God’s omniscience: he calls it God’s eternal moment. For Boethius, God experiences and sees all of eternity in one moment, in one snap of His Almighty fingers. Boethius is important to dating because to God, everyone who is single is also already with their spouse. For God, there is no waiting. Everyone is already in the arms of people who love them.

So that’s how it works, maybe.