I laid in bed at around six'o'clock in the evening a couple weeks ago, listening to the ceiling fan as I stared at the wall. It had been an exhausting week filled with a rainy birthday, a sinus infection, and not enough time with Dave. Earlier that afternoon he and I sat in the Lowe's parking lot for an hour wearily talking through ways we had let each other down and how to get through the rest of the school quarter. As I began to wake up from the three-hour afternoon nap we had taken together, I contemplated many things that fit into one general heading:
Marriage is hard.
Those who are married understand that small sentence with every fiber of their experience and being. Those who are not married may be aware of its truth, but the hard wisdom isn't in you until you're in it. But for me, the difficulties have been opening my eyes to see something about God and the importance - the beauty - of freedom in love.
What's so strange about God is that He is both a parent and a lover to us, both of which are especially clear in His Old Testament words to His beloved nation, Israel. In the Psalms, David talks about God's role in the womb itself; in Hosea, God the parent speaks tenderly of "when Israel was a child" and that he fed him and taught him to walk; in Isaiah, God illustrates Himself as an ever-attentive mother. But to these same people, God is their wooing lover and husband. In Isaiah, he talks of rejoicing over Israel as his "bride"; in Jeremiah and Ezekial, he calls her "an adulterous wife"; in Hosea, God "allures" Israel into the desert in order to reconcile with her and to "betroth" himself to her.
Phil Yancey gives a deft summation:
"Good parents nudge their children from dependence toward freedom. Lovers, however, reverse the pattern. A lover possesses complete freedom, yet chooses to give it away and become dependent ... The difference between those two relationships shows, I believe what God has been seeking in his long history with the human race. He desires not the clinging, helpless love of a child who has no choice, but the mature, freely given love of a lover. He has been 'romancing' us all along." Disappointment with God (p163)
Love does not, cannot, exist without choice. Men were not only given the ability to choose for or against loving men and God, but God has made the choice to love Men. And the choice to love does not come easily; some days, the vow words "and for worse" roll around in your mouth like a sour grape.
God the Ragged Lover has been unbuttoning his shirt to show the scars, the terribly beautiful wounds, of Love that I'm beginning to wear and understand, finally as a lover myself. And He is smiling. Because Love is choosing to stay when my legs tremble with the desire to run. Love is choosing to take the blows and throw the punches, rather than back out of the ring unmarked and independent. Love has the courage to scrap and endure, to take a hit and keep on coming. Love has a tender tenacity that makes the choice every day, in weariness and anger and sadness, to put the gloves back on for another round.
Dave didn't have to talk through things with me in the parking lot - he chose to sit there for an hour with me and work it out. I didn't have to come within 10 feet of him after our discussion - I chose to take a nap with him on the same bed so we could feel closer. And all those situations are an exercise of our freedom and demonstrate the fighting heart of Love. And damn it, it hurts.
That's what God wants. He wants us to understand that loving is fighting because it's choosing. He wants to be loved, which means he wants to be chosen. Yancey says that love is "what power can never win." And that is what Dave and I's decisions to choose each other and to fight for each other is teaching me about Him: God would rather woo the uncertain choice of a lover than demand the obedience of a child.
And I love that freedom.
Comments