kayfromhome

God is a God of unconditional love. Have you ever heard that?

Unconditional love sounds thrilling in theory, but in the everyday, the golden rule… rules. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” We don’t set out to be selfish in love, but if we’re not looking out for ourselves, there’s no guarantee that anyone else will.

In any relationship, eventually, there is an expectation of reciprocity. (Sans rose-colored glasses.) Even the most benevolent human being expects something in return.

All relationships, intentional or not, have an element of trade to them. There’s an intuitive inclination to barter back and forth; a currying of favor and a use of love as currency. To invest. To earn back. We say that we want to be loved unconditionally, yet we try to buy it with time, with words, with attention.

Perhaps part of the reason it’s so hard for us to accept the idea of an unconditionally loving God—a God who loves us when we’re at our worst and our most terrible—is the fact that we would have to admit that we are terrible and capable of terrible and wonderful things.

In one breath, I can praise a person and damn another. I am capable of devastating amounts of love and frightening depths of hate. I have cursed my family and loved my enemy. There is a switch inside of me, prone to flip depending on trite things like mood or circumstance.

Unconditional love exists outside the realm of trade, or even sanity. There’s no losing it. But there’s no earning more of it, either.

God isn’t impressed by us. He isn’t disgusted by us. He just loves us—as we are, in every version of ourselves, in every choice, in every mistake, in every triumph. While our many decisions affect our destination, they never dim, nor enflame His passion.

This is unsettling for those of us accustomed to bargaining, influencing, and controlling. It’s terrifying. Yet it is also freeing. We don’t have to prove ourselves. But neither can we run Him off. Unconditional, then equates to uncontrollable.

It is both freeing and terrifying in that it humbles me and empowers me, because it quite literally has nothing to do with me. Or you.
Not our capabilities, nor our abilities, nor our special originality.

It has zero to do with the object of love, and it has everything to do with the lover of the object.

But maybe that’s the strange beauty of it all. A love that can’t be earned also can’t be lost. A love that refuses to be manipulated, and also refuses to walk away. It may strip away our control, our bargaining power, and our illusion of influence, but what it leaves behind is something sturdier than all of that: The steady, unnerving truth that we are loved completely.

Perhaps the kind of love that feels frightening to accept might also be the only kind of love sturdy enough to trust.