Life Coaching: Unrequited Love

 “You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”

Leviticus 19:18

I don’t want to get on a soapbox today. Or any other day. I want to live my life, be a disciple and be left alone. But I don’t think it works that way... 

Love is a verb. It denotes action. It resonates with excitement. It reverberates with movement, whether physical movement or heart movement, it doesn’t matter. Movement is movement.  We, as Christians, are called to do this messy, ridiculous, unappreciated thing called love. And we are called to embrace it.  

There are many forms of love—friendship love, sexual love, enamored love, God-like love, and the saddest of all, unrequited love. If you’ve never suffered from unrequited love, be thankful. It’s the one type of love whose actions leave a mark—a broken, beaten, bloody heart, from which only God and time can heal. 

As j write this today, I am struck by how much God’s love and unrequited love have in common. Jesus’s Death on the cross was the ultimate act of love. I mean, can it get any more forceful than someone dying for you? I submit that it absolutely cannot. To die for another is not only physical love in action, but spiritual as well. And why did Jesus do this...so humanity could largely reject Him and die unregenerate and unrepentant. Yes, He knows the pain of unrequited love, all right. He knows it very well. 

But just as He knows that pain, He also know the joy when we respond to His love. He knows the exhilaration of just one simple soul crawling up in His lap and saying, “Help me.” He knows the loving sorrow as He bows His head and out His arm around us as we walk away from the grave of a loved one. He know the unbridled joy of one of His children running into His arms just because they can. He knows. And He understands. 

So, knowing all this, what are we gonna do about it? If God loves us, fully knowing that some of us are gonna hate and despise Him, yet loving anyway, how can we emulate that? We have to start small. Take a meal to a sick friend. Hold someone’s hand in the hospital waiting room. Talk to the mother with the screaming child in line at Walmart. Engage in dialogue with an unbeliever and ask them “why.” In other words, think outside the box and do the uncomfortable thing that none of us want to do. We can start today.