About Loving

Has anyone reading this ever tried to read Scripture? Often, when I’m struggling with a life-question, I’ll sit down with the Bible and look for the answer. I’m no theologian, so don’t worry. This isn’t going to be a sermon, but something interesting hit me while I was reading, and I want to share it with you.

Ezekiel is one of those books that I find to be nearly impossible to fully appreciate or understand. This book, in case you haven’t had the chance to read it, spends a great deal of time giving exact instructions of how to build the temple to suit God’s will. Lots of cubits and other measurements I can’t picture, and explicit details that read like a laundry list. It’s boring to me, and demanding, and it sounds to me, at first, like God is so picky that He can never be pleased. I wasn’t very impressed, I have to tell you, though I mean no disrespect to the Author when I say that.

Impressed or not, I was determined to look for the answer to the question that had been bothering me, which was, at the time, all about love. How do I best show people I love them? And how will I know when they love me? Especially when I’m too busy, and too tired, and answering too many other demands to really pay attention. I mostly didn’t like the temple idea, because it seemed like the answer I was getting was that I had to build people temples (not literally, of course, but something very extravagant and arduous had to be done) and they had to build them for me, in order to express true devotion. How exhausting for all of us!

Then it came to me… What if God was only being specific, so that people who wanted to show their love didn’t have to work so hard to guess?

We make people guess, don’t we? And we make ourselves guess what would please our loved ones. It seems lazy to ask someone what they want. We should know, after all, if we truly love them.  And how many times have we had our feelings hurt because someone who “supposedly loves us” did something for us that didn’t please us at all?

She says, “I can’t believe he got me roses. Roses! How typical. How trite. If he loved me, he would totally know I prefer daisies. He could he not know that?” And he says, “I cleaned the gutters and sealed the cedar siding, today. What do you mean I don’t do anything for our family? I do everything I do for our family. How can she not see that?” As if loving someone somehow magically makes us all mind-readers.

For all the books and courses we have on communication, maybe it just boils down to specifically telling people what we need, right now, to feel special, loved, and wanted.  Maybe one of the best ways to show someone how much we love them is to insulate them from ever feeling the uneasiness they feel when they are forced to guess what will make us happy.

Think about it… No guessing means no getting the wrong answer. No wrong answers? Ah… Now, that allows me to feel joy. (Oh, and, just in case you’re wondering, I like lilies.)

The Living in Joy Challenge: Start this every day this week by asking your loved ones, “What one thing can I do, today, to show you I love you?” (You may be surprised at the things you don’t have to do that you THOUGHT were important to them.) Be sure to share your experience. I’d love to hear about it. J