One look at Vicky, I lost my balance. I felt giddy and acted awkwardly around her. Her vivacious beauty had tripped me, and this second grader fell head-over-heels! She counts as my first love.
Maybe you remember your first crushes? Awash in overwhelming, unfamiliar emotions, you forget how to act, how to carry on a conversation, or how to build a relationship. Puppy love may be as cute as a retriever puppy, but it also makes a puppy-like mess of life.
From Accident to Intention . . .
We, adults, learn from our youthful experiences, don’t we? Maybe! When the subject concerns relationships, movies, novels, and music reveal otherwise.
The message we hear from childhood and maintain into adulthood tells us we can unexpectedly FALL in love. To fall usually means the rapid, uncontrolled descent from a higher to a lower level. Further, most often, we consider a fall accidental.
Now, apply that to the most important human relationship. Do you want accidentally to rapidly, uncontrollably make an emotional descent from a higher to a lower relational level? Yet, this comically, or sadly, describes the prominent expectation held by most adults!
The Cruciform Relationship
The cross best represents God’s kind of love. One enters this love with eyes wide open. One decides to love another person selflessly as Jesus chose to shoulder the cross as the eternal expression of divine love. This intentional love takes a cruciform, like the cross Jesus chose.
Wait, why would anyone choose the cross-like love? For two reasons:
• God’s love for us—we believe God offered his Son to suffer our consequences to satisfy God’s justice for a self-determining attitude & lifestyle. This offering represents love. We also believe Jesus accepted the consequences of our divine verdict. His selfless obedience to God offers us the best picture of a Godkind of love in human history. God’s love and Jesus’ willing sacrifice inform the cruciform marriage.
• our desire to love—As a couple responds to that inspiration and challenge, they seek the Spirit’s help to live into that selfless love. As we practice in the marriage, we may play out selfless love in other relationships. Expressing selfless love ensures lasting, redemptive relationships.
Herein abides a spiritual truth often unseen: the selfless love marriage, like the selfless love life, exists only at the inspiration and enabling of God’s Spirit at work in the couple.
Selfless love may be called unnatural in the most positive way! On the other hand, self-centered love—a love that naturally focuses on my wants and needs. Like the seagulls in the movie “Finding Nemo,” we humans are all about “mine, mine, mine.”
Seven-year-old Bill fell for Vicki. I felt overwhelmed by immature emotions and attraction—my feelings and my attraction. This puppy love cared nothing about serving her.
Fourteen years later, I fall for Mary Beth. I’m 21, in seminary, beginning my master’s degree, and hormonally smitten. Those chemicals, thankfully shared by Mary Beth, brought us together but they weren’t enough! Now, 44 years later, we’ve learned that the actual glue that welded us together is selfless service.
Selfless service isn’t accidental or naturally hormone-driven. Instead, God’s Spirit inspires and enables a lowering of self to serve and support another.
When we meet someone who attracts us, those brain chemicals flood our being. It feels like love. Sometimes, it is an immature expression of love. Other times, these feelings never develop into anything more. When they subside-when the thrill is gone-often so is the relationship!
The lasting and most satisfying form of love will come as a decision, not by accident. You cannot fall into selfless love. You choose it-as Jesus chose the cross! You decide to deny self and serve your beloved as empowered by God’s Spirit. That’s when marriage becomes transformed into a cruciform relationship.