When your Mom tells you that you played a great game after a particularly not great game we can feel shallowness in that love. Surely your mom loves you, but in this case the expression of love feels empty. It's a Mom's job to love you and in doing so sometimes only focuses on trying to make you feel better. The intentions are good, but the lack of examination of the facts makes the love hard to receive. But if your Mom tells you how bad you sucked and that you really should not be shooting unless you are under the basket with no one else around, but assures you that she loves you just the same, then that, that is a love that has some weight. It may not feel great, but you can trust the realness of it. When someone actually acknowledges the terrible things we already know to be true, and proceeds to love anyway, that gives Love it's heft. It's not the passive, sentimental, "I've forgotten all your wrongs" Love that changes, it's the very intentional, active, "I know everything about you" Love that makes us new.
"If anyone really knew me, if anyone knew my heart, they could never love me."
This is a sentiment that many of us have felt or continue to feel. It is the ultimate self-enforced condition that prevents us from truly loving.
Let's think about what Unconditional Love really is, what the Grace of God's Love is. God is Love and once we realize we are Loved and accepted we can begin to take our first steps toward being the version of ourselves that he intended us to be. But this Love, while Unconditional (meaning there is no circumstance in which God will cease loving us), it is not a Love that is unexamined. The God of Love is a God that also judges and it's crucially important to realize that you can't have real love without real justice and judgment. This means that even though I have accepted God's love, I still will have to answer for the life I have been given. If God were to simply look at his children and all the broken and evil in their hearts and say, "Oh, I love them, their wickedness doesn't matter." then that would not be real love and he would cease to be just. We know it inherently, a love that doesn't examine is insincere and inauthentic. This should produce an appropriate fear of our own judgment, and at the same time relief that we can claim Christ. God's Love is real and complete because he also judges, because he has looked into our hearts, as only he can, and he loves us anyway.
The capacity to Love one another comes not from how great we are, or how much good we've done, or how much we've fooled others into thinking we are spectacular human beings. No, the capacity to Love comes from God himself: He is just that good. It is very, very fortunate that we cannot look into each others hearts. That is a burden he has given only to himself. The Joy of Joys is that he has looked and chosen us anyway. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to besmirch the pinnacle of God's creation: Human kind. We are amazing, capable of glorious and terrible things. We are in fact capable of Love. But it is only when I can truly accept the depravity of my own heart that I can realize all The Christ has done to make it possible for me to be with him in Eternity. I am really that bad, he is really that good. I can't do enough to out sin his Grace. I just get to enjoy him and that should produce good works within me and around me. And though his Love will never fade, it is right that I should be held accountable for the ways that I don't let that Love change every action of my life.
We spend most of our lives hiding, fearing discovery. We also spend most of our lives aching for real connection that remains just out of reach because of this fear. Yes, we should fear our Lord because he sees all, but also rejoice that his Love has overcome all. Someone said to me recently, "I just want to be known." We all feel the weight of that. Though Christ's examination of our innermost secrets produces real conviction, it also should make us secure in his Love. It is the most authentic sort of Love. A Love that gave it's own life, even though we surely did not deserve it. The Hope is in the Resurrection and the time yet to come.
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