Crazy Love, Chapter 3: Crazy Love

I struggle to say the words "I love you."

I'm a pretty analytical person. And I am also of the persuasion that love is something beautiful and important. So, I probably also struggle to say "I love you" because other people toss the word "love" around so much. I know some people that love everything from their television to their grandma to their toaster oven.

I'm not so sure that's what love is meant to be.

I've never been in love, and I kind of wonder what that feels like. One day, I hope to fall just head over heels in love with a girl and have my heart beat fast and my stomach get butterflies each time she looks at me or talks to me or whatever. So juvenile, I know. But I hope to one day experience that. And I think that the fact that I don't feel like I know what love is or looks like or feels like kind of makes it hard for me to love.

I love my mom and my dad and most of the time, my sister (just kidding, I love her all the time). I love my friends. But I struggle to love God.

In addition to my struggle to say "I love you," I think a big reason why I struggle so much at loving God is simply the nature of the relationship. I just really struggle with loving this immense and huge God that I cannot see, touch, feel, etc. That's kind of weird to me.

I don't know that I carry a ton of baggage into looking at God like a Father. My dad is great, and I love him. However, through the first 12-14 years of my life, dad worked long, hard hours at his job. I feel like I never got to see him that much, and we've since just kind of had this relationship that's not very relational. Just kind of short, sweet, and to the point. We have our great moments, to be sure, but overall it's just kind of a not very relational relationship. Maybe I carry some of that over into my relationship with God, too.

I struggle at loving God. For the longest time, I did all the right Christian stuff, but I'm not sure it really did me much good because I did it because I would feel guilty otherwise. Especially in junior high and my first few years of high school, I did stuff like praying and reading my Bible not because I wanted to or because I loved God and wanted to get closer to Him, but because I would feel guilty and like a bad Christian if I didn't. Eventually, I got so frustrated because I wasn't getting anything out of this stuff that I basically gave up the day-to-day following God stuff. I didn't walk away from the faith or anything, and I certainly still made an effort to worship and follow God, but around my senior year in high school, I just kind of gave up on the whole daily Bible reading and prayer stuff because it was frustrating me and I just hated doing it. It was boring. I really empathized with that loveless faith that Francis described at the beginning of this chaper.

Probably because I was doing all that stuff for all the wrong reasons.

Since the start of 2009, God has really been working and getting a hold of me in this area. Slowly but surely I'm starting to do the day-to-day following God stuff like praying and reading my Bible because I understand that these are not exercises for me to check off of my Christian To-Do List, but that these are real ways in which God and I form a relationship. That's been difficult for me to embrace, but I'm slowly coming around, and that really excites me.

I sincerely agree with Francis Chan... if we ever truly learn and understand the basic idea that God loves us and cares for us and even wants a relationship with us, it will rock us to the core. I think that for me, familiarity has breeded contempt in this area. The message of God's love has become too familiar to me, and I gloss over it like I would any other mundane, ordinary thing. Yet, the fact that God loves me isn't ordinary at all. It's huge! It should shake my whole understanding of faith, following Jesus, and living my life.

After finishing the chapter, I was really overcome with this sense to simply meditate on the question: "What does it mean to say that God loves me?" I turned to 1 Corinthians 13 for my answer, replacing the word "love" with God. It was kind of a powerful exercise to pray about. Through it, I was reminded of God's incredible patience and perseverance with me. I was reminded that God always has my best interests at heart, and is incredibly kind and merciful to me. But most of all, I was reminded that God never fails, and would never leave me.

I love God. That's a fact. I love Him for what He's done for me, but I also love Him because of who He is, and because of the mere fact that even when no one else does, He chooses to care for me, to listen to me, and to love me, even when He gets absolutely nothing out of this relationship (which, let's be honest, is probably 99.99999% of the time).

"The greatest knowledge we can ever have is knowing that God treasures us" (p.61). I pray and pray and pray that God would continue to open my eyes to this mind-blowing truth.