On Love and John Wayne
This was the title of my journal throughout college, an homage to my grandparents. Musings, poems, and stories from a life that actually comprised of many different lives lived in a short period of time.
Been thinking about love a lot lately. Maybe I’m a romantic again, I’m not sure. Hard to tell on so little sleep (as I type this at 12:15am when I could be sleeping)
I have mercifully received a crash course in love. What it is. What it certainly isn’t.
As a christian, love can be tricky. There’s that ever present looming call to be Christlike, something so fucking impossible and yet so intrinsic to the walk with God. To love all. To love unconditionally. To love without self-preservation.
We walk into it tentatively, test the waters, gauge the depth. The first few feet are manageable but then you start to wade away from safety, from the shallow end where your feet are still so firmly planted. This is where the real work begins.
Love the ones who bring
unease. discomfort. agitation.
Love when
it hurts. when it’s inconvenient. when it’s costly.
I think there is an effervescent flow of boldness and timidity that takes over in this, much like a toddler learning to swim or ride a bike. To truly flow forward, you have to release what is behind you. Give up your learning. Your basal sense of self-protection. You have to trust. And damn, this world can make it hard to trust.
If you are willing to continue to learn this process, to develop the muscles it takes for the deep end, you have to shift the conditioned fear of impending doom. You have to trust not in the promise of ease but in the promise of resilience. The lake will certainly chew you up and spit you out (at least two maybe three times if not more) but you begin to trust that you can manage it. That you will survive it. That these muscles you are developing will teach you how to swim with it.
I see some people do this effortlessly. They seem to take a sense of pride and pleasure in the merciless tow of these underlying currents. I am decidedly not one of those people.
I crave — soft, flow, peace. The gentle tow towards knowing.
“To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God.” -Timothy Keller
I crave for it to happen slowly and then all at once. An effortless movement from one encounter to the next, each piece compounding in some small way until you look up and you’ve arrived.
But love is not an arrival, it’s an action. A terrifying, beautiful, pick up your cross daily kind of action.
If I’ve learned anything about love from my walk with God, it is often anything but gentle. It takes over. Stretches you, magnifies you, fractures the inflexible parts of you that default to safety. It demands boldness and vulnerability. I mean real, tangible, heart racing vulnerability. Not the curated vulnerability that still leaves you firmly in the driver’s seat. It demands you give up control. And giving up control feels a lot like diving into the deep end of a lake, one with no promise of a gentle embrace.
I had a whole point to this but the night is too beautiful and I have no bow to wrap this in. I guess I’ll leave you with this:
“But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.” - Khalil Gibran
