read, reflect, blog, repeat: covenants, love, relationships and perversions. oh my!

some people have weird quirks about them that, in all honesty, make them who they are.


some people eat with their mouths open, others can only eat m&m's if they are even numbered and color coded. there are those who sleep with the light on after they watch a scary movie and (my favorite) those who must have their shoes on while in the house.


ok, ok, yes these are all admittedly weird. but hey, some of us *ahem* are just weird!


i am currently once again aware of the small things that make me who i am, and am realizing that there is one tick i have had my whole life. i always read more than one book at a time.


currently at the top of my rather large stack are the five love languages by gary chapman and the sacredness of questioning everything by david dark.


these two books together are reshaping the way i think.


the first idea i want to point out, is one about love. mr chapman, before going into the different types of how we communicate love, as he sees them, opens his book with a few thoughts on the idea of real love verses the "in love" experience. these three things caught my attention:

• falling in love is NOT real love as it is not an act of the will or a conscious choice. we cannot force it to happen nor can we deny it when it does, making it an emotional over-reaction.
• falling in love is NOT love because it is effortless. there is no discipline or conscious effort when you ride this emotional roller coaster. we rely heavily on our instinctual capabilities rather than our reasoning and logical rational, causing us to sometimes do outlandish and unnatural things for each other.
• falling in love usually is selfishly driven. our motives are not to help cultivate or grow the other person rather we are trying to end our own desires to kill the loneliness we feel at the very apex of our being.

i have sat on the idea of community for almost a year now as i am trying to grow into a healthy self. i have had to turn the way i think about relationships completely on its head. i have given up on many relationships and have been cultivating new healthy friendships. i still though am a very selfish being and i believe (though this has no available proof and my debate teacher in high school taught me to never make logical conjectures as i am now going to do) that if this applies to the communion of marriage then this should apply to the community of believers.


i believe that paige benton puts it best in her essay: singled out for good

"Singleness is never carte blanche for selfishness. A spouse is not a sufficient countermeasure for self. The gospel is the only antidote for egocentricity. Christ did not come simply to save us from our sins, he came to save us from our selves. And he most often rescues us from us through relationships, all kinds of relationships. "Are you seeing anyone special?" a young matron in my home church asked patronizingly. "Sure," I smiled. "I see you and you're special." OK, my sentiment was a little less than kind, but the message is true. To be single is not to be alone. If someone asks if you are in a relationship right now, your immediate response should be that you are in dozens. Our range of relational options are not limited to getting married or to living in the sound-proof, isolated booth of Miss America pageants. Christian growth mandates relational richness.

The only time folks talk about human covenants is in premarital counseling. How anemic. If our God is a covenantal God then all of our relationships are covenantal. The gospel is not about how much I love God (I typically love him very little); it is about how much God loves me. My relationships are not about how much friends should love me, they are about how much I get to love them. No single should ever expect relational impoverishment by virtue of being single. We should covenant to love people--to initiate, to serve, to commit.

in trying to understand myself and others better i am at a loss on how to accomplish such a task. in this day and age a covenant means next to nothing to the vast majority. we have become people who have lost the art of intimacy and have no idea how to relate to people, much less love them, if they can't offer us something in return. the sickening thought is not that we do not know how to love, for we love ourselves deeply, the issue is that we cannot love another soul besides our own.


i am re-reading the chapter entitled "spot the pervert - questioning your passions" in david dark's book. he defines the word perversion as: a failure of the imagination, a failure to pay adequate attention. he continues to amplify this thought:

"we, the people, are always more than our use of value. like the GOD in whose image people are made, people are irreducible. there's always more to a person - more stories, more life, more complexities - than we know, the human person when viewed properly, is unfathomable, incalculable, and dear. perversion always says otherwise. perversion is a way of managing, getting down to business, getting a handle on people as if they were things. a person reduced to a thing has been, in the mind of the perverter, dispensed with, taken care of, filed away. perversion is pigeonholing."

in light of this my heart is heavy, for i am a pervert.
the last time i made an assessment on someones character, by the clothes on their frame, puts me in this box.
the last time i had a conversation with someone and was already forming the words that i was to say next, before they were finished, puts me squarely in the hole.
the last time i took a situation and blew it out of proportion, by assuming details and character flaws about a person without taking it to them, and talking it over with others, zings the arrow into the bulls eye.


how many times do i read into situations, or take people for granted?
i would say daily.
my motives for desiring some people in my life and purposefully shunning others is completely self-driven.


i only want to be known by certain people because they fill a physical/emotional/spiritual need in my life.
i don't want to be known by certain people, because i am afraid of being hurt.


ouch. seems like the words of JESUS are a lot harder to accomplish than i could have ever imagined. when asked what the greatest commandment, "He answered: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself. (luke 10:27) as a child i knew this to be impossible. i tried and tried, oh how i tried. i failed over and over. the reality is a covenant is deeply rooted in the one who created them. GOD himself. there is no way to understand or accomplish this without HIM. i cannot love any other than myself. it seems that to even be a christian and to love the GOD of the universe properly i am going to need his help.

i was directed to a beautiful thought on covenantal love the other day. the journal entry entitled: "beloved" by mike of tenth avenue north, made my heart leap with joy, as the love of something bigger than i can imagine was put into layman's terms (i seriously do not understand why i have not heard this before!!!). i do not see any way to put it here without butchering it to pieces so please make time to read it. it truly broke into my perverted heart and made some things click.

lastly, today i received a blog update in my inbox this morning from: "merely theological - blog", detailing the difference between true community and the antithesis of it. besides feeling a bit creeped out that this is the exact thing i needed to hear today, i was utterly grateful to hear another side to this topic that has been tugging at my heart the past few months.

all in all i am trying to see the awe of my maker in the realities of humanity. i am so saddened by people and they utterly frustrate me at times, but only because i am exactly like them. i tend to hate the things that are most like myself in others. i am trying still yes, but only with the help of the ONE who can love you as you truly aught to be loved.