Week 1 of the "Sex, Love, and Dating" series went well. I wish I had come up with a sweet title for this whole deal. Not that it really matters.
Man, what a ridiculous challenge, though. To live up to 1 Cor. 13. Or even to attempt to live up to it.
Not sure how many of you (you being the 3 current subscribers) have seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but I used a clip from it. (It's my favorite movie, so it stirred up all kinds of feelings.) And it rather vividly demonstrates how painful attempting to pull of real love can be.
I won't ruin the movie. But in the clip I used, Joel (main character) is given a chance to take a different path than the one he first tried, to venture into the unknown. And he chooses it. Blindly. In fact, he knows that nothing good can come of it despite his choice. But his choice demonstrates love regardless of how he feels. Really, given the pain of his current life, the obvious choice would be to flee from any similar sort of action.
I believe in entire sanctification. I think that God can do that in us and to us, if He chooses. But man. Really examining just this one passage of scripture...that's hard. It's easy to proclaim the stuff in the passage. To say we "keep no record of wrongs." That we honestly don't want what we don't have i.e. coveting other people's stuff...or significant others. That we don't lose patience. That we always look for the best. And the list goes on. That stuff is easy to say outwardly. Even to demonstrate, most of the time. But man is it hard to fulfill when no one is watching. In your own head.
It's pretty easy for me to forgive. I don't really have much to forgive. But I sometimes find that, subconsciously, I wasn't as forgiving as I'd thought.
Ridiculous as it is, driving around here tests my patience more than I think it has ever been tested. For both foolish and justifiable reasons. But reasons don't matter. Paul didn't say don't lose patience unless you have a really good reason. The challenge isn't "Love until you hit really hard circumstances."
So we have grace to make up for what we can never fulfill. Real love requires wisdom and understanding beyond any human potential, I think. Being concerned for what is best for others requires actually knowing what will, in the end, be best for them.
I guess when it comes down to it, those greatest commandments are in that order partly because, if we fail at the first, there is absolutely no hope of achieving the second. At least, not well. Eventually, our humanity will win, and we will fail to love either ourselves or the potential object of our love...our "neighbor."
Thankfully, that's when 2 people who have given their lives over to fulfilling both of those 2 big "love" commandments can fall back upon the grace of God and do something that they, prior to having that heavenly, perfect, unconditional love in their lives, never could have done. They can love unconditionally.
That's tough. But unfathomably valuable and powerful.
