Extravagant Love
“[ Wake Up from Your Sleep ] Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn’t love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that.” Ephesians 5:1 The Message
I want to keep company with God and learn a life of love. I want to learn how to abandon caution and recklessly love others extravagantly. Somewhere along the way, I heard someone say that “we can only love as deeply as we are willing to grieve.” In other words, we can only truly love someone to the degree we are willing to put ourselves at risk of getting hurt. We either wrap ourselves in a cloak of self-protective defense mechanisms, or we vulnerably reach out in love to other people. We are either thinking of ourselves and what we need, or we are thinking of the other person and what he or she needs. We are either manipulating others to meet our own needs, or we are loving others. I think it is that black and white. And I know that I am so often manipulating rather than loving. It breaks my heart to realize this.
We are either striving to BE LOVED, or we are striving TO LOVE. I think every day is made up of a million moments in which we choose one of these motivations. What we do, we either do out of a desire to protect ourselves or secure our own status as “one loved”, or we abandon that temptation and we jump off the cliff of self preservation and dive into the deep riches of self-denial and sacrifice in an attempt to love someone else. Our observable action is not the thing that another person will necessarily be able to define as being an action of love or self-protection. We can be a wonderful listener because we want to be recongized, thanked and loved for that gift of time, or we can be a wonderful listener because we have thrown aside all desire to be heard and we have fully entered into the world of the one speaking. Both actions look the same to the external observer, but the latter opens the spiritual world of possibilities. The first may make a person popular; but the latter invites the Spirit of Love Himself to enter into that moment and empower it with something supernatural and transforming.
I don’t know how to love like this, but I want to learn. I want to learn how to live a life of extravagant love.
