Walking In Love

A while back someone I know told me, “you walk in love.” She said it to me after I had told her something that surprised her because I had been telling her how much I had been lacking in love in my life. I came from a family that didn’t show love easily or well, and I was the last of a large group of children and I’d been an unwanted and unexpected baby. Over the years of my life I’d done many things to try to gain approval of people – trying to act cool, trying to please people, getting into relationships because I was looking for the warmth of a love I’d never known. Everything I tried always fell flat or worse – sometimes my life would be nearly ruined by a relationship that got me into all kinds of trouble and then turned sour. When I was telling this woman I know about my life that was lacking in love, she looked at me in surprise and said, “But you walk in love!” I had no idea what she could possibly mean because I didn’t feel it and I didn’t see it and I didn’t understand how that could be.

Ephesians 5:2 says, “And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” That’s from the English Standard Version, and there is something slightly different in the New Living Translation, “Live a life filled with love, following the example of Christ. He loved us and offered Himself as a sacrifice for us, a pleasing aroma to God.” Weymouth New Testament begins, “And live and act lovingly,” God’s Word and the NET Bible say, “Live in love,” and the International Standard says, “Live lovingly.” When the woman I know said I was walking in love, that’s what she was talking about.

There is something that happens to us sometimes when we grow up unloved and unwanted. Not only do we spend our lives looking for love and trying to fill that need to be loved, but we also can become very self centered. We are so much in need of love that we are not getting that everything we do centers around that need to be loved. I pursued acting for many years, and though I enjoyed it as an art form, I think the thing that I really loved was having all those people focusing their attention on me for the ten minutes or two hours or half an hour each night when I was on stage. I didn’t think of it that way at the time, but now when I look back on it, the very act of acting, of getting up in front of people to do a play, is asking them to look at you and you only. The lights in the house are dark, and you’re up there on stage in unnaturally bright light. Everything is quiet except for your voice. It’s the perfect way to be seen and heard, especially for someone who is used to being pushed to the side and ignored, someone who grew up in a family where everyone else’s needs were met and theirs weren’t because they were too young and too small and too quiet.

It’s hard to understand God’s love when you have been used to a family that didn’t have enough love to go around. God’s love is unfathomable even for people who have had a loving and supportive family, so if you’ve been lacking in that area in any way – an absent father or mother, or an abusive one, coldness, strictness, authoritativeness, inflexibility – how can you possibly understand the love of a God who is able to love us all in an equally abundant and extravagant way? It took me a while to take it in, and even now I have a hard time understanding it and accepting it. But that’s all He asks us to do – just accept the lavish gift of His love He gives us every day.

A few days ago someone I love with the lavish love of God said out of the blue, “I love you.” They were words that I wasn’t expecting to hear in that moment because we were talking about someone we both know who is a friend but not a close one, but we had been talking about other things and people too, and somehow in the conversation, things that I had said about people and things had added up to those words being said to me. When I laughed and said, “Where did that come from?” he answered, “I don’t know, it’s just you, your heart.” A week before that, someone I ran into who I hadn’t seen in years said something very similar, only this time it was in response to my describing the kind of work I was doing. He said, “I knew you’d end up doing something like that. You have such a big heart.” I was surprised both times, just as I had been surprised when the woman I know said I walked in love, because I don’t see what they see.

When we can start receiving God’s love and we can let it fill us, it fills us to overflowing, and that’s when we can start to walk in love. His love poured out for us and into us by His Spirit saturates the air around us so that we become a fragrant offering that is pleasing to God. It is really nothing that I am doing that these people are responding to, except for my accepting of God’s love in my life. By accepting that gift and understanding that He has given it freely, not because I deserve it, and no matter what I have done or not done in my life, when I accept His gift He just pours it out, and it keeps flowing like rivers of living water that will never run dry.

In John 7:37-38, Jesus says, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” The gateway to the door of Heaven is belief and faith. Sometimes people stumble there because of many different reasons. But whatever the reasons, there is one answer to them all. Love. Simply love. If we can believe in His love for us, no matter who we are, no matter what we are, no matter where we are or where we have been, if we can believe it and accept it, we can walk through that door and begin to walk in a life that is filled with it.

Blessings,

Jannie Susan