What We Need

I was lying on a bench in downtown Raleigh this past weekend waiting to get into a bar that was packed at the time when I finally realized why it is that there are so many love songs on the radio. And books about love. And movies about love. And people who are all about love. In fact, people can't help but be all about love. I think love is like blood because when you lose it, you don't go on living in the same way that you used to. You still walk and eat and shave but you don't live. It struck me on that bench how important the verse is that says "God is love" because that means that God is what we want, which other people have said in better ways than I just did, but that's ok because they were smarter than I am. The point is, when people go crazy about love, they go crazy about finding the thing they know they need. Not the kind of need you feel when you wake up with a terrible headache and need some aspirin(I said aspirin because I can't remember how to spell Ibuprofen) or when you get done with a soccer game and need water. It's the kind of need like bones. You aren't you without them, or it.   Where I've always gotten lost is in the object of love, not love itself. I never argued about whether I needed it or not. I've just argued about how to get to it. Like when a couple is on a trip and they both want to make it to her parents house in the mountains in time for dinner, except that they think they should go different ways and the wife says to go left because damn it it's the house she grew up in so she knows how to get there and the husband wants to go right because damn it the gps says to go that way. I've heard it's rare that both members of a couple like going to their in-laws homes for dinner, so maybe that story is unrealistic. Anyway. I've probably said this before, but for most of my life my thought process around love has looked like this:

        Right Girl (More real version of love) > God (less real version of love)

and

        Right Girl (Cool, and makes me more complete) > God (Cool, and makes me less complete)

and

        Right Girl (I want) > God(I need)
    
I know I know, it's wrong. I've always known it was wrong in the way that you can know things that don't affect your heart or actions at all, like knowing that your middle name was almost Squire but ended up being Robert. Now, though, knowing that my thinking has been wrong is affecting me.

Sometimes, when people talk to me about what God's Will is for my life, I think/say/should have said "How the hell should I know?" I think/say/should have said that because I've spent a lot of time saying things like "God has been showing me this" or "God told me this" or "God wants this". When people have heard me say that, I hope, for their sake, they heard: "blah blah blah blah blah blah". I'm not cynical about God's Will, in fact I'm tremendously supportive of it. I'm cynical about my own fake interpretations of it. Instead of saying things about what God's Will is, I've started listening to Him. Quaint, I know. And you know what, He hasn't had nearly as much to say about the details of my life as I've claimed He has. I haven't heard anything about which city I'll live in, or how God uses relationship struggles to show me how selfish I am, or how the stars will align to meet Destiny Girl(as an aside, if destiny girl turns out to be Beyonce, a former member of Destiny's Child, I won't cry), or how Destiny Girl doesn't exist, or how falling on my knees at just the right or wrong angle happened because I was too bad for too long, or how a squirrel ran on just the right branch at just the right time so that an acorn fell onto my head, or any other such things. Not a word. I'm not saying God doesn't tell those things to some people. I've read in books about people who have heard such things from God. I'm saying that God isn't, and probably hasn't ever, been saying those things to me. All I hear, whenever I listen, is "Come, Follow Me".

We, and that includes me, need love. We just won't find it anywhere before we find it first in God. And by that I mean, we won't find exactly what it is we are looking for before we find Him. Finding God lets the people around you be who they are, which is people, and it lets the girl I marry be who she is, which is a person, and not Jesus. A real, freaking cool person, hopefully, but still a person.

Sometimes, I think Jesus nailed himself to a cross so that we wouldn't have to spend the rest of our lives nailing each other to crosses.