Tonight, love feels like a burden.
The Bible tells us many things about love. Three things remain: Faith, Hope, and Love. The greatest of these is love. God is love. For God so loved the world, that He gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believe in Him, shall not perish but have eternal life.
So I think of God's love, TRUE love and begin to fathom what it means. This is a love that is all-powerful, all-healing, and life-transforming. It is a love that sent Christ to the cross to suffer not only the pain of physical suffering and death but also the unbearable pain of spiritual desolation and separation from God the Father. This punishment that was meant for us for eternity became His. He who was blameless and sinless and pure- He who was loving and good. He took it all. While we turn our back on Him and reject Him and deny Him and sin against Him, He looks at us with that TRUEST of true loves and says, Yes, I will stand in their place.
We are surrounded by images that name themselves love. They are joyful kisses and carefree laughter and youthful faces and passionate embraces. But that was not what the love that saved the world looked like. That love hung on a cross, naked, beaten, heartbroken, lonely, and forsaken as the world grew dark as night at midday. That love shattered death in victory and rolled back the door of a tomb, with holes in His hands as proof. That love was a burden, a cross, a weeping, a suffering, a heartache, a voice crying out in utmost desolation, a battle, a victory, and a fire set in the hearts of many whose eyes He has opened and names He has called.
We do not bask in the warmth and glow of His love, but we are called to be His ambassadors- to take a torch and carry it to the ends of the earth. Most times, this job of loving people as God loves is one of great joy and the blessing of all blessings that we are counted worthy of this task. But at other times, we feel the weight of the love. It is the cross we take up and carry to follow Christ. God calls us to love others, and He places people in our lives to love with the relentless and all-encompassing love of God. We love people who cannot truly love us back. We pray for people who may never know we pray for them. We mourn for the lost and the broken of the world. We pray for the conversion and redemption of our greatest enemies- those who have wounded us deeply.
Everything around me tells me love is the opposite of loneliness. No, the two are sisters. God's great love story reached its pinnacle of love and loneliness on the same day in the same great act- when Christ hung arms spread on the cross. For He did not come into the world to condemn us but to redeem us and call us His children out of His great love for us.
Tonight, I love and pray for people who do not know the depth to which I love them, who do not know the depth to which their Savior loves them that He would place them like burdens on my heart. Those I have loved deepest and lost, and those I have hated most, and those who are broken in need of a Healer. Tonight, this is my cross. This love is a burden. This love is a small piece of the pain Christ feels in the love He bears for us.
