I Love M&Ms?

All my friends are getting married. I am not getting married. I have been in denial about being a grown up for a long time now, and these recent engagements are shaking the fabric of my boyish existence. I have even been asked to perform one of the ceremonies, which is putting a unique spin on the situation. What do I, a single dude in his twenties, know about marriage? To put it simply: I know nothing. Ok, well I guess I know next to nothing. I have seen enough Disney movies to know how love and marriage works, but I did miss the royal wedding so I am certainly not an expert.

 I know that there is supposed to be love involved, but love is such a broad term. Sometimes I’ll be eating peanuts covered in chocolate and a thin candy shell and be compelled to remark, “I love peanut M&Ms” and my brother wittily suggests, “Why don’t you marry them.” I am well aware that joke died years ago, and I know that marring a bag of Peanut M&Ms is absurd, but it does say something about how we view love. It is confusing when we describe the person we want to spend the rest of our life with using the same word I use to proclaim my favorite snack.

Is my feeling about M&M’s really the same feeling that my friend has about his future wife? I hope not. My love lasts until I run out or eat too many and I hope my friend doesn’t get sick of or eat his fiancé.

A while ago I was thinking about how society views love and I decided we often treat it as a commodity. We view it as something we spend on people. There seems to be two general reasons we show people love: to pay someone back or to get something in return. We love people as a response to how they treat us. If someone is nice to me, I will show them some love in return, or if I want something from someone I might try giving them a little love, but rarely do we love someone just for being a person.

When we view love as a commodity, it affects the way we use it. We treat is as if we have a limited supply and are trying not to spend it all.  Rarely do people go into an interaction just giving love freely. People have to earn love. When we view love as a commodity, it selfishly demands that we get something in return. If I love someone else they need to like me or treat me in a certain way, as if I just paid for some service. I think this is where we really see how messed up this version of love is.  I was in a relationship where I thought I really loved the person, but the whole time I was showing her love I was expecting her to love me in a certain way. When she didn’t return that love the way I was expecting it was extremely frustrating. I felt like I was paying for something I wasn’t getting.

I believe this is why the divorce rate is so high in America. We have taken the capitalistic society we live in and translated love into it. We have reduced love to a commodity and the church is all but immune. So I started thinking: how does God view love? How does He look at it and want us to use it?

While I was meditating on how God views love I came to the simple revelation that: “God is love.”

For God, love is not a commodity, but His identity.

This makes much more sense when we look at the life of Jesus. When Jesus travelled around people were drawn to him because He loved them regardless of who they were. It seemed the less deserving the people were of love; the more He gave it to them. He took our system of commodity love and turned it upside down. He loved people just because they were people, even the smelly ones. I say even the smelly ones because I have a hard time loving smelly people. I worked in downtown Seattle at the courthouse and right next to the building was park where hundreds of homeless people lived during the summer. In that park there was a single Honey Bucket. I don’t think there has ever been a smellier port-a-potty in the history of the world. Whenever it was emptied the smell would travel blocks and sometimes there was no escaping it. The smell of the park and the potty kept me away from the homeless people there. I can’t help but think what Jesus would have done in my shoes. I don’t think he would have kept walking away from the stink day after day. He would have walked into the stink and loved the stinky people who lived in the stinky park.   

The reason Jesus was able to love everyone was because love was not something He used as a commodity but rather it was who He was. God taking on flesh in Jesus Christ was love incarnate.  He was, and is, love. That set Him apart from everyone else. He went places and changed lives through love because it was His identity.

The exciting part is that this is not something God had planned just for Jesus. This is God’s plan for us. The church is not called to love certain people, we are called to be love to everyone. We are called to take on love as an identity. If God is light, and God is love, we see that light is love. This is what it means to be the light of the world. The way we illuminate the darkness and bring light to the world is through loving people like Jesus.

Jesus changed the lives of so many people he met. He never did that by winning an argument or telling people how wrong they were. It is freeing to know that I don’t have to try and work at being the perfect person. I don’t have to have all the answers or right things to say. All we need to do is allow God show us His love and allow that to change our identity. To allow God to fill us with His light and watch it shine through our brokenness.

I know I have sort of rambled down a rabbit hole from where I started and I have come nowhere close to exhausting the subject or my thoughts on it. There is so much more that goes into a relationship and particularly a marriage, but for all my friends getting married and anyone else who knows a real person, make love an identity. Don’t love expecting something in return or to pay someone back. Love like God loves us. In spite of our brokenness He sacrificially pours Himself into our lives and changes us. That kind of love is the kind that changes lives; that is the love you can build a life upon.