The Many Ways Love Comes

Let me show you love before I name it. You come to know love by watching it move, the way you come to know a person — not by reading their description, but by being in the room with them.

So come into a few rooms with me.

Here is the first. God is bent down in the dirt at the beginning of everything, shaping a man out of the ground with His own hands, and then leaning in — close, the way you lean over a cradle — and breathing life into him. The man has done nothing yet. He has earned nothing, said nothing, believed nothing. And already he is being loved like that. What do you make of a love that is there before you could possibly deserve it? That is the love you were born into. It did not wait to see how you would turn out.

Here is another room. God is speaking to a small, weak, unimportant people, explaining why He chose them, and you can almost hear them bracing for the reason — surely it was something in us — and He tells them the truth instead:

"It was not because you were more numerous than all the other peoples that the LORD favored and chose you — for in fact you were the least numerous of all peoples. Rather it is because of His love for you." — Deuteronomy 7:7–8 (NET)

He loved them because He loved them. There is no reason under it. They were not picked for being impressive. The love is its own reason. If you have ever lain awake wondering what God could possibly want with someone like you — there is your answer. He wants you. That is the whole of it. It was never about what you brought.

Here is a tender room. God is trying to make His people believe He will not forget them, and He reaches for the strongest love a human being knows:

"Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son she has borne? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you." — Isaiah 49:15 (NET)

A nursing mother — that deep, helpless, bodily love that wakes her in the night before the baby even cries. That, God says, is the kind of love I have for you. And then He goes further than seems possible. Even a mother might forget. I will not. He reaches under the deepest love a person can have and sets His own love lower still, so it can hold up everything above it.

Now a room that may surprise you. The strongest, most stubborn love in the whole Bible — and listen to how a song teaches it:

"Give thanks to the LORD, for He is good, for His loyal love endures forever." — Psalm 136:1 (NET)

Every line of that psalm ends the same way. His loyal love endures forever. Twenty-six times. You might call it repetitive. It is not. The repeating is the point. Whatever happened in the line before — and the psalm walks straight through war and ruin and hard history — the love is still standing at the end of the line. This is the love that keeps its promises when the other one has broken every promise back. The love that will not let go when letting go would be understandable. You are standing on this love right now, today, whether you feel the ground under you or not. A man who once wept over a burned-down city wrote that the only reason we are not destroyed is that this love never gives out.

And now a room that is only two words wide.

"Jesus wept." — John 11:35 (NET)

His friend was dead. The man's sisters were broken with grief. And Jesus — who knew, mind you, that within the hour He would call that dead man out of the grave alive — stood there and wept anyway. Sit with that. He did not hover above their sorrow with the good news already in His pocket. He went down into it. He cried, because the people He loved were crying. That is what a true friend's love is. Not someone who fixes your grief from a safe distance, but someone who sits down in it with you. God is that kind of friend. He does not watch your sorrow from far off. He weeps.

And here is the last room, the one that holds up all the others:

"Love is patient, love is kind, it is not envious. Love does not brag, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-serving, it is not easily angered or resentful. It does not keep a record of wrongs. It rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." — 1 Corinthians 13:4–7 (NET)

Notice — every word of that is something you do, not something you feel. Patient. Kind. Keeping no record. This is the love that chooses, and keeps choosing after the warm feeling has burned off. The love that holds steady toward someone who has not earned an ounce of it. This is the love that went to a cross for people who were not even sorry yet. It is the highest love there is. And it is the one God means to grow in you — not a feeling you wait around to arrive, but a steady thing you do, over and over, until one morning you look up and find it has quietly become who you are.

These are not different loves taking turns. They are the one love that God is, shown to you from different sides — the cradle and the breath, the love with no reason, the mother who will not forget, the loyal love that holds, the friend who weeps, the steady love that chooses. And every one of them, all at once, in a measure you cannot picture, is turned toward you right now.