Untitled thoughts on love

[RedMage]

"Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away."
-1 Corinthians 13:4-8

"We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death."

"Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love."
-I John 3:14, 4:7-8

"For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
-Romans 8:38-39

"All His talk about Love must be a disguise for something else - He must have some real motive for creating them and taking so much trouble about them. The reason one comes to talk as if He really had this impossible Love is our utter failure to find out that real motive. What does He stand to make out of them? That is the insoluble question. I do not see that it can do any harm to tell you that this very problem was a chief cause of Our Father's quarrel with the Enemy. When the creation of man was first mooted and when, even at that stage, the Enemy freely confessed that He foresaw a certain episode about a cross, Our Father very naturally sought an interview and asked for an explanation. The Enemy gave no reply except to produce the story about disinterested love which He has been circulating ever since. This Our Father naturally could not accept. He implored the Enemy to lay his cards on the table, and gave Him every opportunity. He admitted that he felt a real anxiety to know the secret; the Enemy replied 'I wish with all my heart that you did.' It was, I imagine, at this stage in the interview that Our Father's disgust at such an unprovoked lack of confidence caused him to remove himself an infinite distance from the Presence with a suddenness which has given rise to the ridiculous Enemy story that he was forcibly thrown out of Heaven. Since then, we have begun to see why our Oppressor was so secretive. His thrown depends on the secret. Members of His faction have frequently admitted that if we ever came to understand what He means by love, the war would be over and we should re-enter Heaven. And there lies the great task. We know that He cannot really love: nobody can: it doesn't make sense. If we could only find out what He is really up to! Hypothesis after hypothesis has been tried, and still we can't find out."
-C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
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Have you ever felt like someone was "out of your league"?

I'm not talking about just romantic relationships. I mean even in purely platonic friendships. I mean have you ever felt that a person or group of people were far too smart or attractive or cool or righteous or whatever for you to be "worthy" to associate with them?

I suspect most of us have.

Let's say we overcome that fear and we become friends with those "too (whatever)" people. Or let's say that you discover that a friend who you previously considered, well, fairly unremarkable (and thus in your "league") surprises you, and elevates himself or herself in your judgment to a higher plane, becomes "too (whatever)."

Then you have the gnawing fear inside you.

I'm a fraud. I've fooled them somehow. They don't know the real me. If they knew what I was really like, they wouldn't want anything to do with me. I have to get away before they find out.

Well, in a very real sense, I think there's truth in that fear. If anybody knew what you were really like, they wouldn't want anything to do with you.

I firmly believe that on the whole, sinful human beings are inherently unlovable. I believe we love because Christ first loved us, and apart from Him, nobody would ever love anybody. It's part of God's graciousness to all people made in his image (what the theology textbook would call "common grace") that even people who never know Christ as savior are capable of feeling and often do feel sincere love for friends and family members.

Behind that fear, however, is the mixed blessing and curse of distance in a relationship. It's the distance that protects you from being "exposed" and at the same time makes you discount the way people feel about you by letting you attribute it to them not getting a good, close-up look.

They only know me online. If they knew me in real life, they'd detest me.

They only know me at work. If they could see how I am with my family sometimes, they'd hate me.

They see me on the outside, but if they knew my heart, they'd be repulsed.

And again, there's truth in that. Nobody is ever as bad as they absolutely could be, and nobody ever sees just how bad we are. Even we don't see the sum total of our own sinfulness. We just see it better, or think we see it better, than other people sometimes.

But the problem is that the distance is always there. You can reduce it as much as you possibly can, and there's still "daylight" in between. Only God sees the entirety of our hearts. There are places only He can go. Things only He can know. You will never reach a point where you can say, "OK, this person is now close enough to me that I can say that they're making an entirely informed decision on whether or not to love me."

We recoil at the idea that a person's inability to love us if they really knew us is their fault. Oh no, all the blame goes to us. If someone switches continents when they find out the kind of person we really are, they're only doing what anybody would do, and what most people would have done a long time ago.

Once more, that may be partially true. But assigning blame between ourselves and other people misses the point, in my opinion. If we agree that we as sinners are inherently unlovable and that neither we or any other person would be capable of feeling genuine love toward another outside of the grace of God, than the "blame" must be placed squarely on Him. God is love. Love is a "God thing." Strictly speaking, the people who love each other do not enter into the calculation.

Most of us (I hope) come to terms with the idea that God, personally, knows us exhaustively, in all our inner loathsomeness, and loves us just the same. But we forget that the love of other people is also "merely" God loving us through different channels. God really knows us, and He loves us. That much we accept. But without realizing it, when we fear that people will not love us if they really know us, we question that principle. We question God's capacity for love. We are not making ourselves too small, or other people too small; we are making God too small.