Love walked by today

^"If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but I do not have love, I have become as sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophecies, and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
And if I give out all my goods, and if I deliver my body that I be burned, but I do not have love, I am not profited anything.
Love has patience, is kind; love is not envious; love is not vain, is not puffed up; does not behave indecently, does not pursue its own things, is not easily provoked, thinks no evil;
does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices in the truth.
Love quietly covers all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never fails." 1 Corinthians 13:1-5 LITV

It is probably one of the best known verses next to the John 3:16 verse, both to believers and disbelievers alike, and it like the Beloved's verse talks about the power, grace and mercy of Love. Without it, we are nothing more than mere mindless animals. We can know no mercy for we cannot generate the potential for mercy ourselves. We cannot know grace because we would not have the capacity to understand its motivation. We cannot understand sacrifice because we would not know the powerful redemption in the denial of self for those around us. We would be nothing, know nothing, and seek no understanding in anything if we could not understand and know love.

Yet Love is as elusive as the wind it would seem in this world, a hit-or-miss strike in the darkness……and it is as illusionary as it is unseen, unrealized and untasted. We call it a feeling, an emotional response that the evolutionists in society would have us believe is merely a biological function and therefore can be as freewheeling as the mystical conception that was born in the Age of Love with Woodstock and Vietnam and flower children… Those who believe in love as a functional emotion believe that it can cross the gender lines and be something that bears relevant between the same sex, a mystical connection that knows no 'species' survival instinct.

But there are many, even within the Church today, that believe Love can only come once and if it's not perfected in the limit expanse of our limited time, it wasn't love at all but a gastric movement that we mistook for its embrace. We cripple ourselves into believing that we know love, true godly and agape love, only at the hands of our Heavenly Father….and we, as humans, will never experience such love in our lives, broken and complicated as they are.

I have written about this love before, even reflecting upon the aspects and characteristics of Love as spoken by the Apostle Paul who, once he faced his God, Creator and Savior, lived a life that rivaled the Beloved Apostle's love in such a manner that even as his life came to a brutal end after lengthy imprisonment, all he could think of is its motivational factor in his life….

Like the irreducible limits of the human form, anything and everything that bears importance in this world; relationships, family, marriage, and servant service….everything requires the cornerstone building block of love.

But love in the decayed and broken self-serving hands of humanity becomes something less motivational and desired. It isn't, like Paul writes in his Galatians epistle, one of the fruits of the Spirit unless it can be equated to a poisonous one. Love, corrupted by humans, 'hurts' as the song goes…… It becomes a darker image that it was never intended to be, a force that tears apart families and negates any positive force in this world. It's movement becomes something to fear, something to run away from and its very touch becomes acid upon the surface of our hearts.

We look at love as an alien thing, far beyond our capability and skill to create, grow and sustain in any relationship, marriage or family. We think of it as a transitory thing that one day, as that 'new' man or woman walks across our path or the repeated dysfunctional behavior of the one we 'love' becomes a grating scrape across our one remaining nerve or we grow weary of being with the 'same' person each day under the growing burdens of family, employment and life's unexpected twists and turns.

We suffer long….at least in our eyes and great, again at least by our standards. We sacrifice our own agendas to try and give balance, grace and stability to others affected by its absence. We look back upon the road traveled, with its twists and turns…. broken and abused relationships that are its rock-base and pat ourselves on our back for being 'once bitten, twice shy.' Even if we are truthful with our own responsibility in love's destruction, we look at ourselves as great and powerful survivors if we get back upon our feet and stumble forward into the next great mistake that love has become.

We envy those who seem to have it right; often discovering after the destructive implosion of the faked veneer that we were wrong….they didn't have it any more right than we did. We boast of its felt embrace and declare its existence on the highest hills only to recant in the weeks, months or years that follow when we reach that point where its pain can no longer be bore, its sorrow no longer swallowed and its absence no longer denied and we shrug it off as a case of mistaken identity.

This broken, human-limited understanding of love becomes the burdensome shadow of something that is not even close to the truth. It is thrashed out upon the threshing floors of God's kingdom and becomes not the wheat that is kept but rather the chaff that is discarded for it is nothing more than thistles that have snuck into the fields to hide among the truth.

We only have to look to Love's greatest example to understand its true form and to be broken upon its altar so that we can be the example of the undeniable glow of love's embrace.

God came to earth and took upon human form. But that is only a shadowy form, a gushy indistinguishable form of love's arrival upon the broken creation that was made for its existence and pleasure. Love didn't start there, nor did it end there but in the greatest form of its expression…..it was broken by our own lack of understanding and hidden in the mists of time from eyes that no longer wanted to see its light.

This love……was coursing through the sinew and ligaments of Christ as He stood before Pontius Pilate and dripped from His torn back, his pierced head and cobbled hands upon the stone of the courtyard. This love echoed in the words that came from His mouth….not 'puffed up' but simplistic in its understanding and declaration. Even as love took upon the weight of its own crucifixion and staggered through the streets of the city that had once declared its form King, joy echoed through its battered form because of the truth that was playing out before its eyes……..

As the sky turned dark and the agony of the Roman crucifixion ravaged the human form of Christ, love spoke kindness to a thief and assurance of its embrace after the suffering was through. Even as the light turned itself necessarily from the source of corrupted light and love cried out in the ultimate agony of abandonment, patient rang out in the declaration of its ultimate expression…..

"It is finished!"

  And if we, we precious few who have walked upon this world and known what we thought was love, can look at ourselves and know that we gave the ultimate example of true love set before us in the life and sacrifice of our Savior…..we will endure evil, injury and pain without resentment or intent to gain revenge upon its destroyers…..if we know this love, we can endure with patience the slights and neglects of the focus of its light in our expression and declaration of its existence. We see it, if we know and give this love, in everything we do, know and taste and it flavors the salty brine of a broken world and the nasty bile of humanity's corruption of love.

Love bears all things ….covering the faults of another well in the public eyes of a fallen world and speaking of their existence only in private and only with the demand of compassion as its motivation……, endures all things…….takes all injuries intentional and unintentional without retaliation or avenging them because it can only express the fortitude of the firmness of its existence and bears no relation to the conditions or circumstances around it. As one commentary puts it, "What cannot a lover endure for the beloved and for his sake! How many slights and injuries will they put up with! How many hazards will he run and how many difficulties encounter!"

Love believes all things………..   as a default, even to some extreme where there is the darkness of experience to sully its lens. It believes in the stillness of its compassion every promise made, every affirmation given even if evidence of ill will makes an appearance, it stretches its faithful hope beyond reasonable limits and will only with the greatest reluctance find a bad opinion of another but will transition from expressive application of its belief into a hopeful expectation of the repentance and recovery of another.  

If we, these precious few, who have felt its heavenly fire within our hearts allow it to flow from our mouths and live through our movement in the lives of all we have been given to bring its embrace to……what a lovely thing it would be that the broken, battered and disbelieving sinner would direct their gaze upon and feel its warmth diffusing throughout their shattered lives……

There would be no limit of the suffering gladly borne or slights happily endured because we have realized the greatest suffering that was borne and the happy declaration of Love's ultimate triumph in the words of our Risen Lord.

We would be marked by far more than the blood of our redemption…..we would be marked by the very reflection of inhuman love born of the Spirit left to guide us…..

A new commandment give I to you, that you love one another, as I have loved you, that you also love one another, John 13:34.

By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, John 13:35.

Today Love walked by my door and into my heart as I realized……….

Love is the reason I live and love will be the reason I die

And Love, sweet and precious love, has claimed me from the grave.

Love has set me free……..

Beginning of a book?

Have you ever had dreams while your eyes are open and your mind is awake? Dreams as you stand outside in the frozen expanse of the world, covered in the white pristine blanket of snow that doesn't fit with the reality of the moment or the atmosphere that you breathe? Dreams so vivid and actual, not flights of fancy like those of dragons and epic tales of knights going to battle in the Medieval times but real dreams…dreams with enough present day reality that they take the breath from your lungs and pierce your heart with sorrow because of what is not wars with what is? Dreams that are of what could have been, what should have been and what could be……

Maybe it's me….crazily locked in the realm between fantasy and reality. Maybe the disease of the mind, often called insanity, has pierced through the thin veil of normalcy and sheer lunacy that make me more separate from the race to which I was born than that of animals. These moments are there for a minute, and then…like wisps of smoke, they are gone and the harsh clank of the gate that holds such illusional worlds at bay from the normal people sounds in the recesses of my mind even as the heart records a sorrowful memory of what was once seemingly so real that is now once again lost.

Maybe it's a touch of God; daring my fragile and broken mind to desire those things to which He has purposed and equipped me for. Maybe it's nothing more than the brokenness inside of me, isolated and buried so far into my psyche that there are moments, for the sake of pressure release, that it claws and inches its way to the surface to vent the foul air of impossibilities so that I don't rot from the inside out.

I try and grasp such moments and hold on….to live in those worlds the dreams bring and like a druggie taking a much desired hit of their drug of choice, I shake with the effort….promises to myself whispering on the thin air, rapidly spoken in an effort to bring the dreams to reality and maybe cease to exist for a while in the plane of reality and frolic in the world of make-believe hope. A world where there is a balance between loving and being loved, fulfillment and longing, chaos and peace. A world where I am what I thought I should be rather than this broken, simple mess that calls itself human. A man who walks with his head held upright, humble in his pride and gentle in his strength. The kind of man that people look to and say, "Him. I want to be like or to be part of that story of him."

The reality is that such a man, if the capability that creates such a creature actually exists within the biological, spiritual and ethical makeup of this body, was killed a long time ago in the infancy of his beginnings. Such a man was brutally and methodically tortured to the point where such 'flights of fantasy' that would make him believe that he could actually be were wiped out, buried under layers and layers of scar tissue that they could never be realistically resurrected again. Long after the torturers of this 'could-be' man were gone from the grimy and filthy landscape of this world, the man still walks the walk of the dead…..a body so wounded, so callously whipped and beaten that simply doesn't realize that it has earned the right to stop walking and keel over in the embrace of the death given so long ago.

After those moments come and go my mind quests inside itself for the memories of its creation but find nothing but the reflective darkness surrounding the sitting figure of its existence. It cannot envision what it sits upon, where or when. It looks around and sees nothing….as if the dreams have taken with them the very capability of dreaming other things as well when it faded into the black inkiness of wherever. It simply sits and sighs….an empty sigh filled with nothing but the existence of its expelling. The medical term of this condition that exists in the man I am has been labeled in the world to which I am assured is reality, depression. Acute depression that is 'treatable' through even keeled chemicals balancing emotional and physical deficiencies so that I have less dreams and more reality. Maybe that is why I do not take them…..for even if the dreams are nothing, the break from the reality of sorrow and brokenness is well worth the painful return to reality's embrace.

Maybe that is because I die when I am not dreaming, for this dream state is the world I was meant to live in thrive in and grow in, to make real in the brokenness of the world that cannot sustain its impossible enticements. That image that I see of myself in the sharp clarity of the dreams is a confident, firm, and strong man who walks with his head upright scanning the horizons for the next purpose, the next moment of living life to its fullest. A beloved son with the authority of His Father, the Most High King….maybe, in those moments of dreaming, I am simply surrendered totally to the powerful movement and mercy of that Heavenly Being known as the Great I AM, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph….who's Begotten Son, Jesus Christ, came to earth 2,000 years ago and died upon a cross of wood and sin for me. Maybe in those moments of disconnection from the broken reality of this man in this world I find the man that God has created, shaped, molded and purposed from the dawn of my birth for 'things greater than these.' This would explain why, when the moments are gone and the dreams fade from the fevered grasping hands of my frantic self, that darkness descends and I can see nothing for a period……one does not stand in the brightest of light and then have 'night-vision' when plunged back into the darkness….

I don't know why I feel so disorientated after these 'dreams', as if I have been suddenly yanked into a world that isn't real from the one that is of my true self. Maybe its because I know, in the depths of my soul, that I wasn't meant to live in this real world of brokenness and sorrow, pain and isolation, but rather in the world of connection and freedom. And it's recurring memory in the dreams that haunt my closed eyes and beckon to my sorrowed heart is the impus of creation of this connected and free world hollowed out in this world for the benefit of the dreamer and those who realize its alienation and desire in contrast to what 'is'.

I cannot say that this world or the other are true except in my heart's cry at the vanquishing of the one for the jarring impact of the other. That other world is true, not based on fact and scientific data splayed out in the computer printouts of the experiment. Rather, based on the freedom that is lost in the descending darkness afterwards…..the loss of completeness and peace for the reality of sorrow's grasp. As one of the earliest of bards named Tatian once declared…."Retiring by myself, I sought how I might be able to discover the truth. And, while I was giving my most earnest attention to the matter, I happened to meet with certain barbaric writings, too old to be compared with the opinions of the Greeks – yet too divine to be compared with their errors. And I was led to put faith in them by the unpretentious nature of the language, the candid character of the writers, the foreknowledge displayed of future events, the excellent quality of the teachings, and the declaration that the government of the universe is centered in One Being."

Your guess is as good as mine, my dear reader. Possibly nothing more than stirrings of a heart that refuses to beat its last beat, despite the fact the body has long ago given up its sinew and is nothing more than mere bones ……possibly glimpses of alternate 'possibilities' that require only a reset button to be pushed in the brain so that the mind is flushed and a blank slate is created to rewrite the historicity of my life? Or the deliberate, intentional and pressure training of a God who knows that which lies in the blank darkness of the future and only has the fatherly desire to prepare His beloved son for its endurance and overcoming?

I am simply a bard…though not one of poetic expanse or grandiose voice, rather simply a tale-telling chronicler of epic adventures untold by those heroes who travel them, dark and demonic battles between the dark enemy and the warriors of light that rage around the 'innocents' (or rather the ignorant) and the unseen movement of God in the lives of His children that is too often these days forgotten and unobserved by even those whose life He has touched.

I am simply a pilgrim in a land that is not his home…..