What love is not...

“It doesn't please the religious people, who try to force their lies and beliefs on you to control you and take away your freedom and happiness. I love sex and I'm not going to let someone's beliefs in a religion stop me from being me and being happy. Belief in religion doesn't define who we are. WE do. Do what makes you feel good and makes you happy. This is what free will is for… Self Happiness.”
–Anonymous comment from the web

My nephew just had his first birthday, and as most parents do, Micah got his own piece of birthday cake with 2 inches of blue frosting of which he LOVED and ate most of (leaving the rest on his face). He was SO happy. As far as he was concerned he could sit there and eat blue frosting the rest of his life! This may sound extreme, but what if we let him. What if our love for Micah basically boiled down to seeing him happy all the time and we just fed him frosting for the rest of his life. He would be excited and elated (probably from the sugar) for the first day, but then his body would begin shutting down and that very thing that brought him such joy and happiness would begin destroying him physically and emotionally. My sister would be arrested for child abuse and neglect, and her defense would stand as, “I wanted to make him happy! What’s wrong with just letting my child be happy?”

Funny thing however, human happiness does not equal love. God is love but God is so many other things (Justice, Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Mighty, Righteous, All Powerful) that make His expression of love true and pure; If he did not love his people he would in fact set no boundaries and allow us to destroy ourselves through our own lusts and desires… to feed off of the blue icing of this world until we died of malnourishment… to continue thinking if we just eat more then we’ll finally be satisfied… If people were TRULY honest they would admit (as we all can) that the most lonely, unhappy, despairing moments in their lives have come when they selfishly pursued their own desires and ran over anything and anyone that stood in the way. Families ripped apart by a husband/ father’s unfaithfulness, a child’s innocence forever taken by a molester or pornography, a teen’s early death due to drugs and alcohol, suicide or a life left in shattered diseased pieces from homosexuality…. They are all the desires of this world and some appear more inherently evil than others, but I argue that they are all equally destructive and rest in the core statement of the pursuit of happiness.

This unfortunately is the world we live in today and it is nothing new. There may be different stories, but the lies are still the same, and the arguments when you strip them down have few components. I suggest those components can be found in this statement: “My purpose in this life is to make me happy and those I like happy and anyone getting in the way of this purpose does not care about me and what I want; therefore they do not love me.”

What a tragic distorted picture this world has created of ‘love’ … What a misconception we posses as to what true happiness is… Where did we buy into the lie that love equals happiness?
Now please don’t read this and think… okay, love equals unhappiness and misery? That is not true. I argue that happiness ought not be your goal because WE (and I do include myself) cannot be trusted to know what would truly bring us happiness. It is only in the pursuit of the heart of God will we find that happiness was only ever meant to be a byproduct of a relationship with Him… not the main pursuit. In Him, you’ll find the answers. In Him, you’ll find the real purpose for being alive and in Him, you’ll find the acceptance you’ve been trying to grab from every delusion offered on this earth and in Him and only Him will you understand and experience happiness.

God gives boundaries not because they are “religious control devices” or because He doesn’t wish you to be happy; He gives them because we are children in pursuit of the blue icing most of the time when He wishes we’d turn our head and see the feast He’s prepared. Sadness is what I feel when I read the above quote because some of us can see the feast, but if we do not love as God is teaching us then how will we show them the table too? Heck, I WOULDN’T pick an angry snarling mob over blue icing, are you kidding!? The desires of our hearts cannot be trusted and understanding that is the first step toward understanding full surrender to the greater love found through God, and then and only then will we begin to see a glimpse of happiness.

“Sometimes I thank God, for unanswered prayers…just because He may not answer, doesn’t mean he doesn’t care. Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.” – Garth Brooks