“I love you most, Rapunzel.” As my family and I watched a beautiful live reenactment of Disney’s Tangled at a local theatre a few days ago, I couldn’t help think about the true meaning of “love.” Is it just a human construct? Beyond the scope of Disney fairytales, is there such a thing as “true love”? With Valentine’s Day coming up, I thought it would be a good time to share a few thoughts 🙂
Psychologists and psychiatrists across the ages agree that “love” is a basic human need. Maslow placed “love and belonging” on his famous “hierarchy of needs.” A study done of newborn babies found that babies given all the basic physical nutritional and safety needs, but not given love, eventually died. Love seems to be an intrinsic human need and not just a want.
A look at the media cross-culturally reveals the predominance of the “love” theme; think of the most popular songs, movies, plays, novels, and you’ll most likely find some form of love story.
So what is “love”? Did Mother Gothel truly love Rapunzel? Do the heroes and heroines in the movies and novels truly love one another? Do the lyrics of songs reveal true love? And beyond every girl’s dream of a knight in shining armor on a white horse who loves her, does true love really exist? I mean, in the real world?
The Oxford Dictionary defines love as “an intense feeling of deep affection.” But we all know how fluctuating our feelings can be. So is love simply left at the mercy of our feelings, which fluctuate based on our hormones, circumstances, moods, those around us, and even the weather sometimes?! Is this perhaps why people seem to fall out of love as frequently as they fall in love? Does this perhaps help explain the skyrocketing rates of divorce worldwide?
When we try to define love beyond the dictionary definition, we usually think of people who have loved us. Unfortunately, memories of love are usually tangled with memories of pain, for it is usually the people who love us most who also have the keys to hurt us most. But I’m sure we have done our share of hurting others too, even if we didn’t mean to. So, to define love, we must find someone who loves perfectly and try to describe their love. But does such a person exist? Where will our quest for true love lead us?
Sorry to disappoint you, but it will lead us to despondency and despair. For true love that satisfies our eternal souls does not exist in temporal beings. We are designed for “another world,” as CS Lewis says, and “our hearts will remain restless until they rest in the One who created us,” as St. Augustine says.
In my quest for true love, I find myself drawn to the only One who has loved, loves now, and will continue to love for eternity. He is the eternal, everlasting being who is the very definition of love. For before the creation of the universe as we know it, He existed in perfect triune love. And out of the overflow of love, He created the universe and man as the epitome of His created order. He created man out of His own breath, using His own hands, in His own image. He gave man stewardship (management) over His perfect creation. He walked with man in the Garden (Gen. 3:8). Yet man did not reciprocate this love. Man chose to have his own way, to be his own god, to search for love everywhere except God.
God had every right to give up on us. But being the very definition of love, He promised Eve, right after her disastrous choice, that out of her seed would come One who would crush the head of the serpent (Gen. 3:15).
Generations passed and revealed the utter hopelessness of a humanity without God. Unspeakable evil ensued, from the killing of the first sibling to his sibling, to brutal evil practices, even up to the sacrificing of live babies by burning on the hands of metal idols! What happened to love? Sin had destroyed everything good and corrupted every inclination of the human heart (Gen. 6:5).
The only being that remained untainted by sin was God. He was still the very definition of love. He was the only true knight in shining armor that could rescue and redeem His precious bride held in the dungeons of sin and death. And so He came. And He bore the burden of sin that His bride could not bear. And He died in her place. But unlike Flynn Rider who needed Rapunzel to awaken him from death using her magical hair powers, Jesus Christ conquered death because death could not hold the source of life! He died so that our old sinful selves would die with him, and rose so that we would be granted a new self with His resurrection!
What love compares to this?! Indeed, “greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). It is out of His graciousness that Jesus calls us friends! These friends He died for, were the very ones who beat Him, scourged Him, spat at Him, yelled “crucify Him,” and handed him over to be crucified. These friends He died for, were the very ones who denied Him, betrayed Him for 30 pieces of silver, and abandoned Him at His greatest point of need… at the cross. These friends He died for, are the very ones who continue to tell Him that they want nothing to do with Him.
These friends are you and me.
He did not die for us because we were in any way worthy! “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). This, my friends, is the epitome of unconditional love. I have found it nowhere else.
So my friends, let us not deny our deep need for love, but let us quit trying to satiate our eternal thirst using broken cisterns that can hold no water. Only the fountain of Living Water will satisfy (Jer. 2:13). No matter how good the person we love is, they will not satisfy, because no human can. Humans are meant for companionship, and together we must seek to be filled with the only true unending source of perfect unconditional love.
Let us take a different view of Valentine’s Day this year. Let us pour our hearts before our Creator, admit our desperate thirst for living water in a dry and weary land, ask Him to fill us up, and when He does, not only will we be satisfied, but streams of living water will flow from our hearts to those around us (John 7:38). Let us allow our Prince to rescue us from the dungeon of egocentricity and pain, and fill us up so much that we overflow with love to others who may have never experienced such pure love.
It is then that we will hear the purest of voices speak to our hearts,
“I love you most.”
Signed,
God.