Learning to want to love, rather than be loved

Working on my message for Jacob’s Well I got to thinking about our relationship to God and what God wants with us. God doesn’t – as far as I can see – need us for anything. Rather we were created to need God. Or let me put it this way; we were created to be loved by God. That is where the need is – we need God. By being loved by God we learn to love God back.

That led me to think about my role as a parent. My relationship with my children is rather different from my role with my wife. Maybe I’m different from everyone else, but in ‘falling in love’ and getting married I have had a great inclination to be loved by the other person. Yes, I’ve read the books and poems about the person who can’t help but always want to selflessly love the other, but i’m not that perfect… I was always so enraptured with the ‘someone specials’ of my romantic life that I mostly was in love with the idea of being loved by them, and I let them do it. I wallow in being loved by my loved one.

With my kids it changed. They were not able to love me from the start. And, truth be told, they weren’t very good at it for a long time. Oh sure, they could be cute and endearing, even devoted and wholeheartedly trusting, but that was all because of something else – my love for them. They were created to be, first and foremost, loved by me and their mom. And from that love they learned to love us. It was natural for me to love that way with them. It was what i wanted to do. it was fulfilling on its own. Sure, I wanted them to love me back – it would be miserable if they didn’t – but my love didn’t depend on it. Love with them was first and foremost about Kris and I loving them.

I wonder if it is part of God’s grand design (and this isn’t supposed to be an argument against same-sex relationships, they too can take on and raise children as their own) that in marriage we have children to perfect our understanding of love. That with our children we learn how to live to love another, not be loved by another. And hopefully we take that hard earned lesson and apply it to our committed relationships, and begin to better understand the heart of God who created us to love us.