Ways to my Heart

In one of my last posts, I had talked about what love meant to me. In the meantime, I have been learning and throwing things in my suitcase about how to love— because one day I will, God willing, be a wife. And I want to love my husband correctly!

That being said, I want to share some recent things I have picked up along the pathway that God has made for me. 

My post is titled “true love waits” because, it does. When you love someone- like, really love them - won’t you do near anything to keep them? Even if that means being patient, and waiting for the right time, instead of running away because you didn’t get what you wanted, when you wanted it. Love is not selfish- “Love is patient.”

Just this past week I was faced with something where I had to part ways with my selfish view of love and romance and relationships. My “romantic companion” has decided recently to join the military. I am so excited for him. But in order for him to become what he wants to become, he has to move four hours away for two years, and then move away much further for two more years for an internship program that is basically a main highway to his future career!

My initial urge is to pull myself away from him, to give up the fight, to throw the towel in; plucking my little hair self completely off of what is the face of his life, letting our ambitions as a relationship crumble in an instant. After all, who the heck wants to be patient? I mean, I have a hard time waiting for the cookies to come out of the oven. God knows that I can’t be THAT patient. 

But, I really want him. And he is my best friend, and he is such a great part of my life that I would miss a whole lot if I were to just walk away. And in an instant, on the drive home, with tear stains all over my face, I realized that, and it shook me because God completely slapped me in the face. (With love, of course.) It is hard to imagine what my life would be like without him, and God reminded me that in order to love him with the REAL kind of love, I must wait for him. 

God used this difficult situation to show me how selfish I am, and to remind me that the love that he has ordained between a man and a woman is not selfish. But he actually tells us straight up that “love is not self-seeking” (1 Corinthians 13:5).

And even more so, He tells us that “love is patient” (1 Corinthians 13:4). Love is patient— This means that I will wait gently and unselfishly for God’s plan to unfold for our lives, and in order to love my best friend as an action, I must be patient, and lay aside what I want for the sake of him, and for the sake of God getting all the glory.

Finally, 1 Corinthians 13:8 tells us that “love never fails.” Christ has proved this to us once already when the love for his Father and the love for his people motivated him to be crucified. Without that love, we would not have salvation, redemption, sanctification. Love never fails, and God’s love holds, has held, and will held everything together. This includes our relationship. This means that I must be brave, and patient, and as long as I love with the love God has given me, I know that His plan will not fail, and the ambitions for our relationship will not crumble, unless God wants them to. Love never fails! If God gives me the strength to love him through waiting for him, unselfishly, then I must grow and be brave, knowing that love never fails. 

I am publishing this because I am joyful that God is actively teaching me about this, and I know that he is shaping and molding me to maybe become someone’s wife one day, and these are the lessons that will help me be great at it. I am excited to learn in tangible ways how I can love with patience and unselfishness, even though I am not at all expecting it to be easy.

Also, I publish this because I realize that our society contorts love to be something out of a movie- media takes love and marries it (hahaha…) with sinful human nature, giving it selfish motives and selfish results, when really, the bible describes love as a selfless act, and “the true enemy of love is not hate, but selfishness.” I want to share my real-life realization of this— it has always been something I’ve known but now it is something that I may very possibly have to put into action sometime soon. I hope that people who are traveling the same learning journey as I am will delight in the fact that the love that God has ordained for his people to rejoice in, is not the same love that is being portrayed by the world. 

Maybe you are in a relationship and want to abstain from sex until marriage (which I highly recommend.) Or maybe you are in a similar situation to mine, and it seems really hard right now to be patient. Either way, the saying “true love waits” covers all bases. I hope this encourages you to love like Christ.

I am still learning what this word means, and through walking with God and learning about His ways, my definition is being molded more and more! 

If my guy ends up following through with these plans, it will be darn difficult. But through this lesson I have learned that gold is refined by going through the fire, just like you must cross the desert to reach the promise land. He is worth it, just like we were worth it to Christ. So now I must love like Jesus. Unselfishly. 

True love waits. 

I’m not talking about eternal, unconditional, agape love, because everyone who has come to know the Lord Jesus, the REAL Jesus, personally knows that kind of love- because it is a cry of “Abba, Father,”  that has been placed in their hearts in a holy, sanctified manner. Here, I’m talking about romantic love, marriage, being “in love” with someone who God ordained you to be with to have and to hold, for the rest of your lives. What IS it to attain this kind of love? I think at one point in our lives we all ask this question. My, what a broad question. Somewhere between unfaithful relationships, distortion of media, lust, and the ever-so-common mishap of divorce, love is such a misinterpretation.

    Sometimes, we answer questions with things we know from facts; things we just know to ring true. And others can answer questions with things they know from experience. Like, evidence almost. I have known people who can answer this question with evidence- from experience. They have been through the run of many, many long years of marriage, with the same person, and the way they feel about each other remains unwavering. And then, there are people who can only answer this question with a factual emotion, having never experienced that before. People like me and others who are in the throws of growing and learning and finding out; People who stand with this mind-boggling question unanswered. If I were asked this question, “what is love?” my answer would be based off of gathered information from secondary sources. For instance- the bible calls husbands to “love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her.” But, I don’t completely understand what that looks like. I think the world has misconstrued such a holy, beautiful thing such as romantic love into a short-term thing. The phrases, “Loved and lost” and “I was in love with this girl..” come to mind. It has an ending point. The bible says that love never fails. Which means it never ends, either. Christ demonstrated this when He gave Himself for the church and then promised to never leave us or forsake us, to never stop loving us. This shows that love is something that begins, commits, and then grows, and never ends. It sacrifices, holds, conquers, gives, adores, and protects. So, to sum this up, I know that one day I will come to know AND understand what true love is, and then I will be able to answer this question with things from experience. And until then, all I can do is keep turning to the bible to learn and grow in what Christ did for us, so that one day my view of true, pure, romantic, beautiful love, will be no longer misunderstood.