This Love of Mine It Happens All The Time

I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.

Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.  Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

-Philippians 3:10-14 (NIV)

How's your love life?  

My grandparents would always ask me that when I was first going to college.  I was usually taken aback by that question, because my love life was not very good in those days.  My heart was messed up.  I was actually very sad, because of my estrangement from the Lord and lack of direction in my life.

I did not know how much God loved me and how I could love Him back.  I did not know that the whole thing was about the love.  But I was going to find  out.

Our lives are lived through love.  Love has to do with receiving it, trusting it, and living in it.  Some of our human relationships do not do this well

We can even have good love, solid trustworthy, faithful love from our parents and still get some wrong ideas about love going on inside our selves.

The goal of life is love: to be loved and to love.  Our lives are measured by love.  How did you love will be the question when your life has ended.

Along the way in life, we can get in trouble in love.  It can happen in all sorts of ways.  The antidote for trouble is your love relationship with God.  Your reception of God's love is the "keeper of the flame" of your love.

We receive God's love first, and then live loved in that love, loving God back and loving others through God's love.  After we do that, everything else falls into place in our lives behind that love.

So, when our hearts are not on that track which is a lifestyle in God's love, we are vulnerable to love problems.  We will have problems with other people, things, places, ideas, and with ourselves related to love.

Healing love

"Crazy Love" is a book by Francis Chan.  "Crazy Love" is also the name of a song by Poco, from 1979, that is about getting over and moving on from someone.  It is about "breaking free from an imprisoned memory".    The chorus goes like this:

It happens all the time
This crazy love of mine
Wraps around my heart
Refusin' to unwind
Crazy love

But, God heals our memories.  Even Christians get hurt and rejected in love.  The healing is in our relationship with God.

We might need to do something, we might need to get untied or unbound from something in our past that hurt our heart and causes us trouble in the present.

Earlier, I quoted Paul, from Philippians.  Before he says that he wants to know Christ and press on in his pursuit of him, he says that he wants to forget the past: "Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead".  

Paul had a chequered past.  When he wrote to the Philippians, he was future oriented, but with a past history.  Paul is an example for us to follow of pressing on towards Christ.

If your past haunts you, maybe a person or a situation from the past, you might have a trauma bond.  The trauma could have been abuse or loss.  In the song, 'Crazy Love', it is a loss.  His heart was broken and he had a trauma bond from a lost relationship.

He heals my whole life.

The Christian life is not a life where we just say to each other and to our selves, "just get over it!".  We do not triumphalistically  get over things, but we live in love.  We are walking wounded people who are loved and sorrowful.

We can rejoice and be sorrowful.  We can weep and mourn while still living loved.  We all ought to weep with those who weep and mourn with those who mourn and take care of the sick among us.

We grieve the loss, we have a testimony, we have scars, and we may walk with a limp.  But the key to our lives is love.  And I can not love and hold bitterness or judgement.  Love introduces me to grace, which gives me the power to forgive and become forgetting.

Memories can fade when we see Jesus in our hearts and in other Christians.

If your heart is nagged with a trauma bond, you can begin to walk into healing, by walking with Jesus into and through your trauma.  It is not a formula, but a transformational relationship.  Jesus heals memories, if you let him.

We also need to share our stories with one another.  We need God and we need humans.  Complete healing and wholeness come in community.

We were designed by God to love an be loved.  If you were not loved or your heart was traumatized by faulty love, God has provided a way.  It is tempting to say that God will heal you and you will be cured, like it never happened.

We are survivors.

The healing of a life or of a broken heart or trauma loss will come in and through relationship with Jesus Christ.  The relationship is where the healing is.  We can have our memories healed, that are binding us; but the new life come out of Christ.

Like Paul, we are wounded healers.  We have wounds that are still healing and we have scars.  We have sad stories that are true.  We are survivors.

We have love, love that we are living in that gives us new, fulfilling life.  We have a faith in God's faithfulness.  We have hope that is rooted in relationship with Jesus.

Our whole lives are regulated by love.  What I love, who I love, and who loves me.  I want to have a clear heart.  I see now.

His love is enough.  In His love is my destiny.  In His love is total contentment.