Why don't I love you? A manifesto of sorts.

(My husband was told to act like me.)

"Love is the way back to Eden.
It is the way back to life."

-Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers


Yesterday, I stood up in front of my classmates and talked about how I have handed my heart to everyone around me and asked them my deepest questions. I said that that has been like setting my heart on a stool and then just waiting for someone to come along and kick the legs out and break my heart again.

What does it look like for relationships to be restored to their original intent? What does it look like for women to love men as brothers and men to love women and care for them as sisters? What if we women walked around every day reminding other women of how beautiful they are instead of looking for guys to do that, or instead of staring each other up and down, ranking the competition?

I have been in this world of brokenness too long to really know, but I am starting to pray for the answers. Do we even have a vision for what relationships would look like in their original design? I love my husband dearly, as I just told him as he walked up to me for our regular Panera work date, but what would it look like for me to actually perfectly follow the direction in Ephesians 5 to respect him? I try, but I mean, really, what would that look like?

I almost want to ask for artistic submissions to this blog so that we could start dreaming together . . . yes?

But, I mean, really. It kind of sucks that I am stuck in this body, and so for now, as much as I want beautiful unity with the people around me, I end up getting jealous of them or lusting after them, or getting impatient with them just because their brains work differently from mine. I really want things to be like they are in that scene in the movie Tangled, where everyone is in the town square, dancing around with each other, waving ribbons, and genuinely, truly, purely invested in one another's joy.

But they aren't...not yet.

But I think we can, and in fact are called to "build a beautiful city", like the musical Godspell implores us to do. We can start now. We don't get it, but we can start learning. God can show us. Really, I mean it, people. He cares passionately, He loves us, and He is super creative. Why can't we start learning what it really means to be a people who are truly UNITED? I mean, if Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane, about to die in a way he was so stressed about  that He was sweating blood, and He thought it best to pray that His children "would be one, as we are one" (John 17:22 in the Bible), then isn't unity a pretty important thing to be thinking about?

I'm not saying you aren't. But have you lost hope?

Hope is a touchy subject, probably more than sex. I have gone so far as to lead a Bible study for high schoolers about sex, but have spent much less time wrestling with the deep issue of hope. And yet hope is a pretty offensive thing, that is, if you have been given hope lies in the past. If "hope" has betrayed you, it is like an ex that you never want to see again because the pain is too deep.

But what if hope is real?

And what if this hope that only Jesus can offer us is real--Jesus, this stranger who is so familiar, who somehow finds us in that deep lonely pit inside and lights a match? What if he actually has the power to make everything right, including our relationships?

I had this quote stuck in my heart this afternoon, and decided to look it up, and it turns out it is attributed to one Julia of Norwich, a woman living in the 14th century. Here is her story. I love the words she heard God speak to her in a vision, words that fly like an arrow across the centuries and pierce my tear ducts.

"It was necessary that there should be sin; but

all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

I want to love you.
But I don't know how.
But I know who does.

Let's ask Him, shall we?