Letting Him love me.

I think the root of my anxiousness and sadness and struggle is that I don’t let Jesus love me. I’m beginning to think that when we sing and pray and read the Word he lets us think we are praising and obeying him, and we are but really he’s loving us. He’s letting us think it’s us loving him but it’s the other way around. I’m wondering if everything beautiful about my life stems from letting him love on me.

Marriage is hard, from what I’ve gathered. In fact, it’s so hard that I have been kind of thinking for a while that I don’t really know that I even want it. And my pastor was preaching on marriage because lately some of his closest spiritual leader friends have been caught in adultery and their marriage has fallen apart. When he stands up there talking about it…his voice is sort of strained like how your throat gets when you’re trying not to cry. That’s how much his heart is breaking. And sometimes, because it’s all over the place, it just becomes casual that the whole institution of marriage seems so far gone. But marriage is the closest thing we get to what God looks like…the fusion of a man and a woman into one being that can then create something as precious and holy and miraculous as a child. The most beautiful things about men and about women are both little bits of God in us and its only when the two are made one that we get to see a small sliver of what God and Jesus and the Spirit look like. Oh, so he talked about how we have this self-loathing, so many of us, and that it makes us want to repel our husbands and wives and families.  Our hearts hurt and we don’t share this hurt, maybe we don’t even know its there, but when someone tries to really love us, we reject them. And the one who reached out in love is equally hurt because they put their heart on the line and their lover pulled away. And then we have that lie seep into our soul that says See? You knew they were going to reject you. Didn’t you know that they don’t really love you? You should have just stayed to yourself all along.

I know this thought. It is poisonous. And I’ve thought that I am able to not trust any people but still trust God. I cannot. It may seem like it but it is so evident in my resistance to God’s love. Because his love is far more scandalous than that of anyone here. It’s far more perfect and holy. And if I am resisting love because I think I will get hurt, I will do the same with Jesus. Whether I know it or not. And then I wonder why I’m so sad and unsatisfied with a life full of Jesus. But no matter how I close I am…I can leave those walls up and keep him out. I really think it’s both or neither. When we allow the fullness of ourselves to be exposed to the love of Jesus, only then are we able to love people. Because we can give them the choice to reject us because our hearts don’t ache for their love.

I’m not sure how much sense any of this is making, but all I know is that I reject his love all the time, because I’ve got walls up and I’m so scared to let them down. Jesus says come and drink, but I keep saying that I’m not thirsty. And he knows that if I don’t drink that I’ll die. My soul and my heart will wither away. In Chronicles of Narnia there is a part where Lucy is at the stream and so thirsty and Aslan is standing there and she is terrified of him. She’s scared that if she takes her eyes off him and goes to the stream that he will eat her. She asks if he eats little girls and he says he’s swallowed girls and boys, countries and kingdoms. She says promise me you won’t do anything to me and he says I’ll make no such promise. She so so thirsty but she’s also terrified so she says she going to find another stream then. And he says there is no other stream.

There is no other stream.