This might sound morbid or depressing – my roommate thought it did – but lately I have been greatly comforted by a wonderful thought: this life is really short. I mean, ridiculously short. I’m going to be 28 in three weeks. Where did the time go? This summer is my 10 year high school reunion. I’ve barely blinked an eye.
Lately for me I have been grieving the changes occurring within certain relationships with people here, relationships that will inevitably have to change or end once the end of the school year arrives and we all scatter across the globe! It has been sad to contemplate the changes that I’m facing in terms of my friendships here, especially when I have felt incredibly blessed and supported by them.
This is something about love that is sometimes ugly to face – it makes us vulnerable to loss, to neediness. It often becomes tainted with selfishness and competitiveness. This happens with friendships – who is spending more time with who? Who didn’t invite me to what event? Or with members of the opposite sex, when we look to them to affirm our interesting-ness, our desirability.
In his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis talks about the difference between need-love and gift-love. Need-love being the expression of the human longing for companionship, the need we have to experience ourselves against the presence of the other. Gift-love, on the other hand, is rooted in a desire to express gratitude for another’s love by giving to them in some way.
Better than both these, though, is agape. Unconditional love. Love that doesn’t expect anything in return, that doesn’t demand reciprocation. Love that gives without questions, without secret motivations. Without the need for affirmation or fulfillment from another. Love that gives of itself without selfishness or exclusivity or jealousy or manipulation.
This is what I am looking forward to about heaven. We will be able to love like that! All the icky self-focused desires that taint our human love will be wiped clean. All the needs we look for human love to fill will instead be met in God, and we will be able to love others without needing them to complete us in some way. We’ll be able to love without pain. Right now, love and pain are intimate sisters. We can never love deeply on this planet without an equally deep understanding that real love can hurt us, maim us, leave us broken. I get hurt when the messy emotions of my heart get tyrannical in their hopes. C.S. Lewis also once wrote that “The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers, all the perturbations of love is hell.”
But heaven (can you imagine it !) - we will be able to love without holding back, without worrying about appropriateness or inappropriateness, or keeping yourself safe, or not scaring someone away, or being afraid of being alone, or being afraid of hurting the other person, or getting hurt yourself, or, or, or…
Recently a friend of mine has been going through a break-up with her boyfriend, and she was lamenting to me the fact that, “he can’t love me the way I need to be loved.” To which my only reply is, “of course he can’t.” None of us can love another person in the way they need to be loved. We can learn how to show love in the way they can receive it, but we can never love a person to the extent that they need to be loved. We are all bottomless pits of ache, aching for our Creator’s acceptance and love. When we try to fill that need with human love, we are always disappointed. Human love will never fill us like we need to be filled. To expect another person to love us like we need to be loved is to be constantly hurt and disappointed because every person we meet will fail in loving. Just like we will inevitably fail them.
And because this life is short, practicing how to love like we’ll love in heaven is the only goal I can see worth pursuing in the time I have left.
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