Love is a Blue-Collar Profession

Everything you do matters. Every little thing.

It’s probably one of the most encouraging (and terrifying) statements one can hear… but I think it’s true. I don’t know exactly why, but deep down, I’d even say I know it’s true.

We often look at life as if it’s made up of the big events – births, weddings, deaths, graduations, break-ups, engagements… Really, these moments are only the revealing, the results of all the small moments that came before. It’s sobering to think how truly small the defining moments of our lives often are. Think of all the marriages that exist because someone swiped right on a photo. Did they know what a critical moment that was? That they were turning the page of their history with a small motion of the thumb? People always look to the engagement and the wedding, but I say it’s time we respect the swipe. It’s the little moments that make us who we are, and it’s these little decisions that have preoccupied my mind the past few months.

Thinking about all the ways small moments can impact our lives, you begin to comprehend the deep importance of every decision. If all our thoughts, decisions, and actions are the first steps in the chain reactions leading to the rest of our lives, then everything one does matters. That’s a liberating truth when we feel lost in the sea of ambiguity regarding life’s big questions. On the other hand, it highlights the importance and seriousness of our choices, which is a bit daunting… I often feel this weight when making even small decisions, knowing that opportunity and misfortune constantly knock on our doors. As to which one we are opening ourselves to, we often can’t know.

There’s an interesting choice in approach here – the temptation is often to try and divine the door to fortune and success. However, there’s this curious fact that humans write stories and sing songs about their struggles. We don’t read stories about easy, successful lives, though we value the outcome in a sense. There’s something else we treasure much more – those glimpses of the deep, deep beauty inherent in life that are captured in moments of deep struggle and emotion. We don’t want life to be easy, we want life to be worth it, as the cliché goes. But perhaps this is more than cliché.

Perhaps this is the key to the approach above. Perhaps we should do the little things that are worth it? And what is more worth it than love?

I guess what I’m saying is, sometimes taking the path of love requires willingly losing – and thereby voluntarily opening our door to misfortune. It’s sad to say, but most of the people I see trying to do this do it unconsciously, acting out of insecurities and hurts. They mean well, but what they really want is to *be* loved, and then to cherish the warmth of their object of affection in return. From my view, we can love a bit differently. Through a wellspring not our own, we may fill our cup with a love from above, one that imbues us with a courage and bravery to risk the threat of loss. And in this way, we may love with clear eyes, and full hearts – facing head-on all that is to come.

My fingers struggle to type the above… though once again, I think it’s true. But as to how we can feel this Love, how we can know it, I do not know for sure. I have only experienced moments, glimpses even… What I can say is, I suspect this great Love is found not in the grand moments of inspiration or understanding, but in the little moments – those faithful moments – practiced out and worked over seasons of hardship, suffered daily, when we give our days and years in devotion to those fallen creatures beside us, and the One above. In this way, Love is a blue-collar profession.

 Love is the Hardest Art

Love means doing the little things even when they become mundane. As an example, I recently watched a video from a divorce lawyer online. He told a story of a woman who realized her marriage was collapsing, not from a big fight or an instance of infidelity, but from a simple oversight – one day she noticed her spouse didn’t restock her favorite granola. He had always done so for years – each day, she would open the kitchen cabinet whenever she wanted a snack to see the granola bag full. However, one day she opened the cabinet and behold, it was empty. She at first thought it may have been a mistake, but slowly she saw that her husband was no longer showing her that he was thinking about her. He stopped caring about the little things. So she did as well. Eventually, the whole marriage fell apart.

Such an unfortunate story shows how love requires surrender – surrendering our self-centered thoughts, surrendering our self-centered ideas, even surrendering the moments where we just want to chill and do our thing in order to show our loved ones we care. The simplest gesture may suffice – just a little something to show the miracle that someone else is thinking about and even cherishing you – that could be enough to sustain your spirit in a hard time. And that could also be enough to enliven and sustain a beautiful relationship in times of stress.

Going Down to the House of Mourning

The older I get, and the deeper I fall into love, the more I find that it is made mostly of suffering rather than those moments of joyful bliss.

I spent much of a recent weekend contemplating this fact, at times with a great sense of sadness. Is this the dark truth, that the most meaningful life is one found in the shadows, the sorrows, the pain? My heart recoils at the thought, but there is something comforting in this as well… troubled at the thought, I sought answers in a book I’ve often turned to in times of disillusionment and sorrow. Ecclesiastes 7:1-4 reads as follows:

“It is better to go to the house of mourning

  than to go to the house of feasting,

for this is the end of all mankind,

    and the living will lay it to heart.

Sorrow is better than laughter,

    for by sadness of face the heart is made glad.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,

    but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.”

These sayings are difficult. My heart sank a bit each time I read them, wondering if this is really how it is. Sadly, I know deep down that there is truth in these statements. Somehow, sorrow really is better than laughter, for by sorrow the heart is made glad. I thought back to our Savior – a man of sorrows. And I thought back to those little moments of surrender that fill the life lived in love. There’s an acceptance of sorrow that must occur when we open ourselves to love.

Naturally, the more you love, the more you *can* lose. As Voldemort whispers to Harry as he tempts him to despair, we also hear the ominous whisper from the enemy, “You are a fool… and you will lose everything”. This is what the enemy whispers to us as well when we begin to take that first step in love’s journey, reminding us what we stand to lose when we invest our hearts in people and places away from ourselves. Yet there is a silver lining – “by sadness of face, the heart is made glad” – what was it that Christ accomplished through His extreme suffering? And how can sorrow produce such joy?

Complicating our predicament is that loving fallen humans in a fallen world feels, in some ways, like a terrible idea! That we are called to do so points us to the deeper plan. Evidently, God has a purpose behind having broken creatures love other broken creatures, perhaps to teach us an important lesson about ourselves. Most importantly, God teaches something about His own great love through this experience. Anyone who has truly fallen in love has reckoned with their own insufficiency. At some point, we realize the other’s insufficiency as well. That glimpse of deep beauty in our loved ones, that awareness of the image of God, fades when life wears down, when tiredness, complacency, fear, anger, and pain cloud our visages. Loving someone through these moments is far harder than in the moments across the candlelit table, or in the romantic dream. Why must we struggle? What is it that we learn when sacrificing our love to the ungrateful, the broken, the hurt – the ones who can’t pay us back?

I turn to these wise words from Charles Spurgeon, looking into the darkness together with him as he points out the faint glow of the sunrise in the distance:

“But, beloved, good as “the house of mourning” is, excellent as its shall may be, mark well that Solomon does not say that, “the house of mourning” is morally better than “the house of feasting”, or that there is more virtue in weeping than in rejoicing; yet he does say that “it is better to go to the house of mourning,” — it is better to sit by the side of the widow, it is better to take the fatherless child on your knee, it is better to sit down and weep with those that weep, than it is to go to the pavilion of happiness, and rejoice with those that rejoice. With such hearts as ours, it is better. Were we perfect, it would be equally good; but since we are inclined to evil, it, is better that we should “go to the house of mourning.” God has made man upright; but the hand of sin has pushed us from the perpendicular, and we stand like the leaning tower of Pisa, inclined to the earth, and threatening to fall. It is right, then, that, as we are inclined to sin, we should likewise be made to bend to sorrow.”

– Charles Spurgeon

In our sinful states, broken and disordered as we are, perhaps the house of mourning acts as a sort of hospital ground for us, a place where our hearts may be softened and healed. A place where humility reigns free, unbounded by the temptations of success and pleasure that dance all around us under twenty-first century spotlights. In this way, when we go to this house, we bring something with us when we return back. Our characters are deepened and our hearts softened. We are better lovers upon our return back to the land between ecstasy and gloom.

The Handshake

“You toss all the mornings lost to the clouds and you watch it go

Your fair weather friends on a parachute binge get lost when the wind blows

The handshake’s stuck on the tip of my tongue

It tastes like death but it looks like fun

I was a loner

I was just waiting by myself

When you, warped temptress

Rose to bring me happiness and wealth

Black tears, black smile, black credit cards and shoes

You can call all the people you want

But it’s you who’s being used”

I think the human being is dreadfully tempted by forgetfulness. Specifically of one’s problems, one’s pains – perhaps this is what drives us to pleasure, hedonism, and selfishness most of all. And so the question could be asked, why do we run from love? Why would we flee something so great? Why do we take the Handshake when we know we’re only going to be used at the end of the day?

Perhaps because the great and the terrible are inexplicably intertwined. As Nietzsche well puts it, ““But what if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together, that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other – that whoever wanted to learn to ‘jubilate up to the heavens’ would also have to be prepared for ‘depression unto death’? And that is how things may well be.” It may be true – it may very well be this way. But Nietzsche doesn’t seem to have the answers, and so we turn back to the scriptures. A wise man once sorted it all out, till he came to an end – the end of wisdom, the end of pleasure, and the vanity of life. Seeming vanity – I can’t quite tell. The moral of the story in Ecclesiastes doesn’t quite seem to be that it’s all pointless, only that God alone knows the meaning of this life – and hides much of it from us.

With much of the purpose of this life hidden from us, how can we find that strength to face the terrible price of Love? How can we face the implications of Love, knowing it’s a giving of ourselves away despite the uncertainty of this world? Tim Keller shares the following words:

“Hardly anybody wants to actually face the implications of death. Most people, they don’t want to think about it so they have sex, they have food, they do things, they travel – even the Lion King – they do everything they can to make death seem natural. There’s even a wonderful song about it, “The Circle of Life”… and Camus says, No, it is not a lovely thought, and here’s why: a world in which everyone you have ever loved, or will love, is going to become fertilizer, and then you will, and then everyone who will ever remember anything you’ve ever done – it’s not a world that fits us, it’s not a world that supports the most basic desire of our hearts. What’s the most basic desire of our hearts? The most basic desire of our hearts is to have love last. It’s to have beauty last. It’s that when we do something right, it counts – it counts forever… And this world cannot sustain that any more than Martian air can sustain your lungs. And therefore, this world can’t be home.”

In light of Keller’s words, the balm offered for our sorrows is this – we should not fear loss in this life because this life is not our home. Anything we hoped to keep is vanity – a striving after the wind. Yet God through Jesus has offered us a way home, and a way to store the treasure of our striving away from here on earth, where moth eats and rust destroys and thieves steal. Instead, He lays it up in heaven, where God prepares a glorious future home for us. He promises us that all this love we strive for, are broken by, and thirst after is not for nought. When we love as Christ taught us to love, we may store treasure in heaven, for where our treasure is, there will our hearts be also. And so it’s all worth it – even the little moments. We can rest assured that all our trials and all our pains from our attempts to love are being woven together into a beautiful future. For God uses all things together for the good of those who believe in Him.

A Wellspring of Courage – Miscellaneous Thoughts on Blue-Collar Love

How do we deal with the fear of loss? How do we deal with the fear of losing the things we love – our friends, our family, our spouses, our dreams?

– We must be armed with the deepest meaning possible. Ironically, this is Love, and Love Himself. God is Love, and we must have Love in us as we seek to love. In a sense, because God is Love, and God is eternal and good, love is inherently worth it.

– Love stores treasure in heaven. Love often stresses us out because we “love” only for the things here. We seek the benefits of love on earth, but we fear if we lose the thing we love, that that love was for nought. If we love our dog, and he one day dies, then that love is gone forever. If we love our spouse, then something were to happen to them, that love would be “gone”. This is not the case – love is eternal, and we are called to it. When we love, we store up treasure in heaven as we follow God’s call, loving what he gives us, even as it all, including us, is temporary on this earth. This is where we must look to the hope provided by the Resurrection – our grand redemption found in Christ.

– Love hurts! And it’s best to set expectations accordingly. This one is for us dreamers (of which I am very much one). We love to imagine those perfect moments – being loved by our communities when we pour into our friends, our parents beaming at us as we make them proud, those tender moments with our significant others, looking deeply into each other’s eyes, telling them how much they mean – these imaginary moments may take us away from the beautiful, flawed creatures in front of us when things don’t go as expected. Perhaps we thought our sweet gesture would be received with joy, only to have it briefly acknowledged or ignored. Maybe that brokenhearted friend scoffs at our encouragement. It’s so easy to become discouraged when we have high ideals and fantasies about our love.

-Don’t let an unrealistic ideal crush a beautiful, messy reality. Another one for us dreamers! Often, as I’ve written about before, a seemingly cruel twist of fate is a bridge to a better future. We shouldn’t allow our visions of an ideal to drown the great beauty and meaning found in real friendships and relationships.

-Prayer. You have to believe in the power of prayer, because that’s what our whole religion is predicated on – God hearing us. Hearing us when we confess our sins, ask for forgiveness, cry out for help. And if He hears us, then He must love us, too. Cry out to Him in times of darkness – He will deliver you, even if you can’t feel it.

A Note of Encouragement from Two Unexpected Sources.

I’d like to share two experiences of unexpected encouragement I received.

I was once coming into a season of restoration from a difficult time of intense doubt and anxiety. Enjoying time with my small group, we spoke of Jesus, of God’s love and work in our lives and in our community.

“Did I hear y’all talking about Jesus over here?”

A woman in a dining uniform appeared behind our couch. She was so excited, and soon began to engage us on what lesson we were talking about. Before long, she spoke about her own struggles, then shared the following encouragement: “When life gets hard, you gotta PUSH – Pray Until Something Happens! When life gets hard, always pray – tell Him what you need and He’ll hear you. Then, always be thankful! When I wake up and don’t feel like getting out of bed, I always remember – He didn’t have to wake me up today. God chose to wake you up. He didn’t have to. So be thankful each time your feet touch the ground.”

I always remember this when I feel like I’m up against a wall, or like my dreams and visions for the future are out of reach. All due to the kindness of a Christian woman to strangers – or better yet, Christian brothers. It was love, and I needed it that day.

The second occasion still occurs fairly regularly! Often I work late when my friend has his 8 o’clock shift on Thursdays. One of my favorite moments comes when our friend Sherri appears from down the hallway, a big smile on her face. “Hii!! I was hoping I’d see you guys today!” Sherri is quick to give me a hug and some of the best encouragement. I remember once when she said I had this glowing aura about me, assuring me that I was soon to be taken off the market with how attractive I was. She sat down to talk about life, hear how I was doing, and, despite having no reason to stop and be friendly, she hears me out and comforts me with advice and encouragement. An unprompted act of love that has given me deep encouragement in times when I’ve needed it. These small acts of love are something I’ll always remember fondly, and are a great picture of the sort of greatness found in even the simplest acts, such as interrupting a conversation to give important advice, or even creating friendship through encouragement and goodwill.

Why do I bring up these stories? Really, because deep down to truly love we need the greatest encouragement. We need to be loved first, and loved in such a way that we are changed thereafter. Once we have that Love, then we are changed, we are strengthened against the onslaught of life’s discouragement, life’s disappointments, life’s pains. Empowered to walk through the valley of the shadow of death and yet fear no evil. A spark of Christ’s love for us may be found even in the smallest of these acts. And even that small spark may kindle the fire in our hears needed to light our way through the (at times) dreadfully dark path of love. Only then can we say with the scriptures,

“Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes with the morning.”  – Psalm 30:5