By His Grace, 

Mikki

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Mikki

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The unasked question that haunted this woman is the same one that every human asks, “Who will love me for me?”  The words of J.J. Heller expresses this longing in all our hearts:

We are made for love, both God’s love and the love of others; yet, we all at times, find ourselves feeling empty, feeling unloved.

There is no more powerful force than unconditional love. It has the power to transform the heart of the most hardened criminal and the hardest part of my heart and your heart for none of us are that different from each other. Our hearts all need healing, and we all long for the unconditional love of another.

If we all need this kind of love so desperately, why don’t we just freely give it to one another? It would seem such an easy answer to the problems of this world. Let’s just love. Love well. Love deeply. Love unconditionally.

Yet we are all caught in our own stories, seeking to be filled ourselves, too busy, too self-absorbed or too wounded or too defensive or a myriad of other things which keep us stuck, unable to move beyond our own insecurities and needs to offer others what they need and what we so desperately long for ourselves.

Meaningful relationships require that we move into the more true places of each other’s hearts. When we experience being vulnerable with another person or a small group of people and are rewarded by love and acceptance, our hearts dance with joy. We know, “I was made for this kind of love.” Yet it’s so much work, relationally, to keep the walls down from around our hearts.

We’ve all been hurt. We are born into a fallen-state of being and can’t make it through this life without experiencing pain and some measure of being failed by those we love. Conversely, we all fail others. We all fail to love well, at times.

God’s gift of love came to us through Christ who both loved and is now loving us well. He unconditionally loves us.

What does this unconditional love mean?

Romans 5:8 offers this glimpse into unconditional love. “But God demonstrated His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

When we had done nothing for God, when we were still a sinner and had not opened our hearts to receive God’s love, God gave Christ for us.

Isn’t that our hearts cry, “Who will love me for me, not what I’ve done or what I will become?”

This kind of love transforms us. A love that gives all in order to know us, free us, heal us, and fill us.

Our hearts all cry, “Who will love me for me?” yet we are often unwilling to allow others to really know who we are. Many times, we are unwilling to take the risk to share the deepest parts of our hearts with another. Maybe we tried that before and got our hearts broken. We learned our lesson well and responded by building a fortress around our hearts to protect ourselves. While that fortress may keep us from being hurt, it also isolates us from being loved and from truly loving others.

My hope and my prayer today is that we all will experience deeper levels of unconditional love in our relationships, that we will choose to love well in spite of the risk of being hurt, and that most of all, we will choose the unconditional love of Christ which has the power to change and heal us.

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