Sharing...

This Sunday at Church my pastor taught something that really hit me. At this time in my life I am particularly focused on love. I am 19 and single and feel the need to find myself a man. But I realized that I am in love with the idea of love. What I should be in love with is my relationship with Jesus Christ.

Because while I am so preoccupied with finding myself a husband I need to let God write that story and focus on my relationship with Him. While us girls are looking for love here on Earth, there is an epic love story already written for us and a hero waiting to win our hearts...and his name is Jesus Christ.

I wanted to share this passage from "The Sacred Romance." I think it is so convicting and powerful.

"God could have given up on the love affair with mankind. He could have resorted to power and demanded our loyalty, or given us a kind of spiritual lobotomy that would take away our choice to love Him. Even now, He could easily obliterate our enemy and demand the allegiance of our hearts, but the love affair that began in the laughter of the trinity would be over, at least for us. And Satan's accusation that the kingdom of God is established only through raw power would be vindicated.

Once we understand God's desire to possess our heart through love rather than power, we can fathom even more deeply the depths of God's anguish as He pleads with His people to give up their spiritual adultery and return to His love.

Have you ever dated someone that you just knew, from the first time you met her, that she was the one that you wanted to spend your life with? As you laughed and talked and marveled together, you felt your love deepen to a heart bond that you knew you never wanted to free yourself from. And have you ever been shocked to find one day that the one you loved so deeply and who you thought loved you just as passionately, had been dating other guys and, moreover, was spending more and more of her time with your worst enemy? Have you ever had to literally turn a lover over to a mortal enemy and allow her to find out for herself what his intentions toward her really were? Have you ever had to lie in bed knowing she was believing his lies and was having sex with him every night? Have you ever sat helplessly by in a parking lot, while your enemy and his friends took turns raping your lover even as you sat nearby unable to win her heart enough so she would trust you to rescue her? Have you ever called this one you had loved for so long, even the day after her rape, and asked her if she was ready to come back to you only to have her say her heart was still captured by your enemy? Have you ever watched your lover's beauty slowly diminish and fade in a haze of alcohol, drugs, occult practices, and infant sacrifice until she is no longer recognizable in body or soul? Have you ever loved one so much that you even sent your only Son to talk with her about your love for her, knowing that he will be killed by her?

All this and more God has endured because of His refusal to stop loving us. Indeed, the very depth and faithfulness of His love for us along with His desire for our freely given love in return, are what give Satan the ammunition to wound God so deeply as he carries out his unceasing campaign to make us into God's enemy.

Satan is at work reinterpreting our own individual stories in order to make God our enemy, he is also at work dismantling the Sacred Romance so that there is nothing visible to take our breath away. Counting on our vanity and blindness, he seduces us to try to control life by living in the smaller stories we all construct to one degree or another. He accuses God to us and us to God. He accuses us through the words of parents, friends, and God Himself. He calls good evil and evil good and always helps us question whether God has anything good in mind in His plans for us.

Our experience of life deteriorates from the passion of a grand love affair, in the midst of a life and death battle, to an endless series of chores and errands, busyness that separates us from God, each other, and even from our own thirstiness."

A lot of food for thought, but something that has been weighing on my heart.

Peace and Love,

Em