(what has love become?) it's not like we used to hear in those old songs. and it's not like yours..

tonight i watched Les Miserables.

if you want to see something that will make you think about grace and love and mercy, that's a good place to begin. it's a very good story. do you remember a time when stories were built by characters who reflected God's mode of love?

me neither.

i wonder, just what love is. lately i've been feeling like mine is broken. my love i mean.

i've also been reading a book, and a quote in the beginning of this book says this:
Man's love is of man's life a thing apart
'Tis a woman's whole existence.
(-Byron)
oh really? then i am reallllly broken. absolutely defective in fact, i suppose!

but just hold on because honestly, what is love? who ever really told me, or you, what love is? i bet our parents tried and i bet God tried and i bet movies won. don't they always win? because the definition we hear the most repeated is the definition we expect a thing to embody. i think i knew better once...i think i knew God's love better once...but then i watched too many movies.

but maybe love ... well i don't feel qualified to define it or discount the definitions that i don't think define it. but here is the thing. in that movie there were a lot of different loves. but the only one that remained steady and true under all the tumultuous, selfish, seeking versions, was grace.

grace is a love that nobody tells us stories of anymore. we don't even tell ourselves stories of grace, do we? do we daydream of giving gracious love? or do we daydream of love that is received..love that comes to us..love we can capture and keep. even if we suppose the one we dream of receiving this love from is one whom we love...what is that? what is the love we think we have for them? is it more often than not greed masquarading as love?

the villain of Les Miserables is a police inspector whose life ambition, whose motivation, whose love becomes the hunt for jean val jean--the former convict who has turned his life around as a result of an act of grace and devoted it to multiplying that grace. it is absolutely tragic because this "villain" wastes his entire existence on the lusty pursuit of his heart's tainted desire.

is our love tainted? is that why we can't love very well? is that why we long for love that never seems to find us...because it is too busy longing for its love to come as well? is that why we doubt what we feel pieces of and label "love"--afraid to give it because it might not be returned?

has greed become the new definition of love? could you ask yourself why you love someone? could i ask myself that? if i love because i lack, because i want, because my own love is tainted and i need someone else's virtue to compensate for my failing...what has love become?

God's love is not greedy..he does not reach out to capture us up in his fists. love cannot clutch the loved. it cannot own. an open hand, extended to the loved with a gift of grace is maybe real. and to be loved in return might be once the gift is extracted and the open hand lies empty..the beloved takes the hand. did we forget that part? oh...what are we doing..