Love

Something I find quite intersting is the idea that loving someone means valuing someone; showing them they mean something. Love is a validation of a person's significance. You can understand pretty quickly what I'm talking about when you think back to a time when you shared some important information about your life with another person and that person didn't didn't pay attention to you, my guess is you probably didn't feel very special at that moment. What you wanted was for that person to listen intently and to affirm that what's happening in your life, to you, matters.

Love meaning valuing someone,  helps us to truely understand our hard emotions:

Anger, although it can show itself as outrage and sometimes violent, is a response to a LOSS of LOVE. It is a boundary violation where someone has done something to make you feel that you don't matter much.

Fear is a threat of rejection, it is a LOSS of LOVE that perpetuates itself into acts of hate to try to compensate for the sting of rejection. 

Sadness is a loss of control, also a loss of love. Those who have sadness are trying to recover or get back whats been taken from them

A few weeks ago the Christian philosopher, Peter Rollins came and spoke at our church and shared a wonderful analogy that gets at this idea...

What is significant about a child scoring a goal at their soccer game? Tt's not the mere fact that they scoared the goal that is significant, it's the fact that in the stands are the child's parents who witnessed this accomplishment. If no one saw the child score the goal, it wouldn't matter. Love brings value, meaning, purpose to things.  

Another way of looking at it,

When you are in a room you do not think of the light that is making the room visible, you are thinking about the things that you can see in the room because of the light. This is essentially what God does for us. God is the one who shines on us and gives us value & purpose. It is a humble love that does not seek to recognize itself but it illuminates the other. Our duty then ought to be to give recognition to who it is that truely gives us our value.

I could go on and on about all the connections that go with this but the main thing I want to emphasize is this:

God is love.... Because of what Christ did for us on the cross, out of love, we have all become valuable in God's eye's.

We don't owe Christ anything for this, but because of it, we are called children of God and in God's eyes we appear spotless like his son Jesus.

If we ever come to question our value or significance remember what Christ did for us... And when we choose to join Christ, what continues to make us significant is the fact that we are joined with him. He lives inside of us and infuses our lives with meaning and purpose. He is present in us,  illuminating us. Don't be fooled, this alone is what makes you valuable.