We tend to love children not because of who they are, but because of whose they are.

After all, we don't even really know who children are, or who they're going to be, because they don't yet have the words to tell us, and maybe they don't even know themselves. (I think this is true of older people as well, but it's easy to forget adults don't know).

I realized this today and it was a good reminder for me, because if I had to love everyone for who they were, it would be too hard. But just knowing that each person is a child of God and that I should treat them as carefully as I'd treat the child of anyone I love makes sense. I can wrap my mind around how I might treat the son or daughter of one of my best friends. The fact that God considers us his children.. I cannot wrap my mind around. But that's an idea for another day.

Lungs

If you've listened to music by Florence and the Machine, you know that her songs tend to be unapologetically dark. My friend said to me recently, "I love how raw she is." Her music is so layered, and her melodies are so original and complex. I can't get enough of this music. Taking all the songs together, Lungs is absolutely one of the best albums I've ever heard in my life. The thing is, many or most of the songs are written in the second person and at some point send the message: "you are killing me [sometimes literally] but I love you anyway."

Job 13:15 came to mind. Pick your translation, but the message is "Though he slay me, yet I put my hope in him." Actually, The Message translation is "even if he killed me, I'd keep on hoping." This is even more intense. This is also 100% the kind of thing you might hear in the songs on the Lungs album.

I realized, and not for the first time, that love is giving the keys to your life and death to someone (or something?) besides yourself. It's not like tossing them a keyring while grinning, because you don't necessarily make this giving into a conscious choice, or experience pleasure from it. It's just what happens. It can be deliberate, but it's simply the natural result of caring all that much about another person.

When I say the keys to your life and death, it might literally refer to your body (I have an example of that in a second), or to the life/death of your heart, or that of your mind. I mean, really, the mind is the most obvious one, because a lot of what happens to your heart is experienced in the mind as an event. Caring about someone else's well-being is something that happens in your mind, and may even take up a lot of space there.

It's not a coincidence to this line of thinking that the first and most important commandment in all the law is to love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, strength, passions, intellect, will, etc etc. It's not a coincidence that there has never been a more perfect love than that between the Father and the Son, and yet the Son was sent to die. Jesus allowed humanity to kill him because he loved them so much.

This message that relates love and death seems completely insane and morbid and unhealthy from some standpoints, but I submit that rather than an ideal pattern for how to love the best in the best of all possible worlds, it seems to be an inevitable result of life here below that will be observed by anyone who's looking. If I've learned anything lately, it's been that no part of human life is pure. To interact with humanity is to get blood, tears, saliva, sweat, and worse on your hands (and maybe all over). Loving a real live person is being okay with whatever mess they throw at you, and separating your response to the mess from your response to the eternal being who effected the mess. (Which can mean anything. Sometimes the most loving response to a person is to step back.)

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Comparing the love that the author of the songs was writing about to the love that the Father has for his children is of course completely figurative, a simile that must not be extended too far, but it's worth considering that love is love is love, (add the word "true" or "real" before each of those), wherever we find it, whatever muck we have to dig through for the treasure.