“I’m scared that I’ll leave him and then realise in 5 years that I’m alone and missing a man who, underneath it all, loved me… or that I’ll stay with him and find that after all that, in whatever way he needed me, he never really loved me.”
We refer to all sorts of things as love, but which one of them can you build your life on?
“He treats me like sh*t but, underneath, he loves me.”
No. He doesn’t. To love is to give priority to. To put the needs of the object of your love above your own. The opposite, in this sense, would be selfishness as much as hate. How can you tell if he loves you? Open your eyes… is he loving you? Of course, this could be faked, may not last, and is not necessarily romantic… but looking for some abstract emotion or psychological need beneath all manner of obnoxious behaviour is pointless.
And so with God. John 14:15. If you’re not doing what God commands (Matthew 25:34-45), if your time is spent instead in the pursuit of self-fulfillment, do you love God? You’ll know if you love Jesus ‘cos you’ll be doing it.
Do I love God? Not much, apparently. Do I love my wife? Not as much as I say I do. Not as much as I’d like to.
In the predominantly excellent movie, ‘Paris, Je T’aime’, a man, about to leave his wife for a young lover, instead devotes himself to her on hearing of her terminal illness, sacrificing his desires and ambitions to care for her every need and comfort. After a while, we’re told, “by acting like a man in love, he became a man in love“. I cried. Both times I saw it.
I don’t know about the ‘love’ thing, to be honest I’m starting to wonder if one can really ever know what real love is. I always just end up resolving to try harder– which of course never feels like enough.
But regarding the general idea that one can simply ‘act’ a certain way in order to become that way. I have experienced success with this, um, method. If you can call it that. To me it seems like ‘duh’, because when you take a step back and see this for what it is, it’s actually no different from the idea of ‘practise’.
I wish I could think of some biblical examples of where God tells us to practise, but the only thing I can think of that I know is actually a Godly principle is perseverance, which does loosely correlate.