Love Never Fails

Love never fails, but any other motivation eventually will. When I lift back the veil of any good deed and see what the driving force is, then it makes sense why some acts of kindness produce beautiful results and other seemingly good deeds end up causing someone pain.

Looking back over my life, I see the story of a person who did what I thought was right in my own eyes at the time, thinking myself to be a good and loving soul who would never intentionally hurt anyone. But when I think of the many ways that I hurt myself (and subsequently the people who cared about me), I realize that I had a jumble of motivators other than love harbored in my soul which did fail me.

These love-imposters have to pretend to be good, so that we will follow them, but they are always born in dark places conceived in pain. My parents created a family ostensibly out of love, but the underlying reason they came together was to get away from their parents’ homes…pain. I was the happy daughter of a mother who loved her children, my innocent joy the evidence of a mother’s unfailing love. But the pain-motivator reared its ugly head in my father and steered him down a destructive path. He probably thought he was doing the right thing at the time by following the “love” in his heart for another woman, but he fooled himself.

This crushing blow to my child’s heart caused a flood of confusing emotions to rush into my soul, mixing the love with pain and insecurity and mistrust. These were like cancer cells attaching themselves to my good cells, making it hard to even tell them apart. The story after this point is of a good student and church youth leader who lived a responsible life hoping that the healthy cells would outgrow the cancer cells and they would die. But cancer is insidious, and it ran an underground life that masqueraded as love, but was truly self-destructive.

To snuff out the disease in my heart, I thought I was creating love as I joined myself to guy after guy who was just as confused about love as I was. The cancer only grew stronger. More hurt, more pain playing like it was love, failing me.

Deep in the core of my being, God’s love was there. The only true love. Perfect love. Complete love. Healing love. Throughout the seasons of my story, I sensed the warmth and light of His love at different intensities.

After many dark years when true love was hiding behind the clouds of independence, self-sufficiency, fun, recognition and tolerance, God’s love came to me through a man. I knew I felt the warmth of his love connecting with God’s love in me, but it didn’t make much sense. It was irrational, unexpected, unsolicited. After living under the delusion that love had to be earned or stolen, experiencing the dawning of real love was foreign and amazing!

Just as deep calls to deep, the true love in each of us bound us together “for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, ‘til death do us part”! Of course, we all have the waters of our souls carrying trash within the pools of love. My trash of insecurity clouded over the light of true love, and I quickly got back to trying to earn love—never quite measuring up, since only love never fails. Of course, since he’s a human being, his trash showed up as well, and we became two people building a home on true love, but with weeds growing as well.

We had many imposters posing as love: sacrificial service, recognition, duty, judgments, self-righteousness, ambition. But these motivators all prove themselves to be the weeds that they are when they grow into resentment, disillusionment, hurt, disappointment and burnout.

I have gotten too old and tired to carry around anymore trash. For the rest of my life, I want only love. I am throwing out all the trash that clouds up love. Only love never fails. May every deed, every word, every thought be born of love. That is true LIFE!