I’ve been thinking about love lately, and I wonder if we’ve made the category of love too small. We usually recognize love by how it feels. Love feels warm, comforting, accepting, intimate, safe. And certainly those things can be love. But if All-that-is is love, then what do we do with the parts of life that don’t feel loving at all? Pain doesn’t usually feel like love. Loss doesn’t feel like love. Rejection doesn’t feel like love. Consequences don’t feel like love. Change can feel downright terrible. So does love always feel good?
Have we confused love with pleasantness.
A parent can love a child and still say no. A surgeon can cut into us in order to heal us. Someone can walk away from a relationship because staying would be destructive. Truth can hurt and still be loving. Sometimes the thing that disrupts our lives is the very thing that exposes something in us that needed to change.
Is it possible love isn’t always about making us feel good. Or is love something much larger.
If All-that-is somehow rests within Love, then its possible love is less an emotion and more a generative force. Something that gives, connects, creates, reveals, corrects, grows and moves life toward greater wholeness. We may experience some of that as comfort, but we may experience other parts of it as challenge, loss, uncertainty or even pain.
That makes life as a kind of school for the soul. If we’re here to learn, grow and become, then perhaps we shouldn’t expect every lesson to feel loving while we’re going through it. The student doesn’t always appreciate the teacher. Sometimes the lesson is uncomfortable precisely because it is exposing something we couldn’t see before.
Maybe we’ve taken one particular human experience—“I feel loved”—and made it the definition of Love itself. But what if Love is considerably bigger than the feeling of being loved?
That changes the way I hear the statement, “God is love.” Maybe it isn’t saying that everything God does should feel pleasant to us. Maybe it’s pointing toward something much deeper—that underneath existence is a movement toward life, relationship, growth and wholeness.
Of course, I don’t want to use that idea to excuse cruelty, abuse, injustice or suffering. Those things shouldn’t simply be renamed “love.” But perhaps our emotional reaction to an experience isn’t always enough to tell us what that experience ultimately means.
Maybe love isn’t always the hug. Sometimes it’s the boundary. Sometimes it’s the uncomfortable truth. Sometimes it’s letting go. Sometimes it’s the experience that forces us to grow.
It’s possible love doesn’t always look like love.
Maybe feeling loved is simply one of the ways Love feels from the inside.
Thoughts For Thinkers 