We were
in the corner of a hole in the wall Vietnamese restaurant slurping pho and
dissecting our lives on the table like cadavers. She was sitting in front of me
fervently communicating her ideals on love and life and God in between sips of
tea and bites of spring rolls.
She said,
“Everyone knows that God is love but it’s deeper than its surface value… Here’s
the thing- it's going to blow your mind, are you ready?” she asked giddily. “Love mirrors the attributes of God.” She stared at me
with her icy blue eyes, like a chemist who anxiously awaits for the reaction to
transpire before him in breathless anticipation.
I took
the bait.
“Because
people make the mistake of making Love their god. But Love is not a god. It
can’t be,” I expounded. “So what is love? If you try to define it, you will
inadvertently describe God. That’s the beauty and brilliance of it,” I
exclaimed. “We reflect Him through love. Love is sacrifice; love is forgiveness.
Love is mercy. Love is Light. Love is just. Love is a perfecting force that not
only perfects the lover but the beloved. God is every good thing. Nothing that
is good can be separated from Him. God is Love. But love is not a god. Love is the
shadow of His goodness- what He always was and always will be.”
“I call
it “stupid love”, she declared. “Because it isn’t supposed to make any sense.
Because you’re not supposed to be able to rationalize it. You will never be
able to earn it. There’s no formula you can plug in that quantifies your “work”
to equate your “love earnings”. Love is forgiving and not just forgiving to
say, ‘I forgive you and here is a closer look at my wound.’ It’s, ‘I love you.
So I forgive you, and what wound?’ There’s no keeping score, no desire to.”
We both
took a simultaneous sip of our tea. I coiled the noodles in my soup with my
chopsticks, observing how the basil intertwined into a conglomerate mass of
noodle and vegetable.
“When I
meet people, I only feel comfortable around the weirdoes, the offbeat humans,
the people on the outskirts… They’re the people I naturally gravitate towards,”
she confessed, without even looking up from her bowl. “I judge people. Really quickly. I only
accept the individuals I feel I can identify with.”
“Me too”,
I confessed. “We all do. We don’t want to be around people that make us feel unaccepted.
We don’t want to feel the sting of rejection. So we filter our love to those
that are deemed as deserving, those that we have stamped with a big red “safe
to love” stamp. But real love breaks down walls. People are begging you to
liberate them from their confines. We are all the same, really. People are
looking for that one person who will walk up to them and courageously declare,
“I love you and I am not scared of your walls, even the ones you built yourself- your walls of impossible expectations and sharp insecurities. Your walls of fear and
shame, pain and pride. I love you and I am not leaving until I have chipped away
at every stone that restricts you. I don’t care if I’m bad for your image. I
don’t care if you have been living in such a suffocating superficial state that
you’re used to the shallow end and now you don’t know if its fear of depth or
comfort that has kept you up top. I love you. And I am not leaving you the same
way.”
“That’s
convicting”, she whispered as she grabbed her chest.
“I know.
And the trick is that you can’t have any walls yourself. You have to embrace
all of your hang-ups, your quirks- all of it. You have to pull them down in
order to give the love you wish to receive,” I professed. “You have to courageously
love yourself to in order to courageously love others. You have to risk
vulnerability. You have to be willing to get hurt. It’s the only way that it
works.”
“Because
God is love”, she surmised. “And the only way to define love and to truly live
it, is to reflect Him.”
“And what
is more vulnerable, more painful than self-sacrifice? Than laying down your
life on a cross? He embraced shame. He embraced rejection. He shattered walls."
The
waiter placed the check on the table. We both looked at him a little more
sincerely and I think this time we actually saw him.
“No
walls?” she said.
“No walls,” I smiled.
