Before I get started with this 52 Week Plan, can you identify that shock of hair or plant or fur sticking out of the girl’s knit cap? Is it hair or a plant on the other side of her head?
On a more serious note:
To be loved and to give love in a relationship is the theme or plot line of so many works of literature, movies, songs, and television programs. And, you know what, that theme has been being developed for each of the 71 years I have been alive. Watching movies and listening to music before my era illustrates the same theme.
I maintain that the goal for which we strive is not strictly a human form of our very best love. I believe with all my heart that the love for which we long and dream is the very love God offers to us and offers to gift to us for use in this life. Let’s call it intimate love.
There are three essential aspects of intimate love to be discovered if we are going to actually experience it. Leave out one aspect and intimate love disappears in a breath. Aspect 1: I know you and want to know you even more. Aspect 2: I am vulnerable with you and let you know me…the real me, as much as I know how to be real. Aspect 3: We know each other for the purpose of caring for and meeting the other’s needs. What do you think about those aspects? Are they all needed for real, intimate love, as I proposed at the beginning of this paragraph?
Look at God’s love for us.
Aspect 1: He, the God who IS Love (I John 4:18-19) wants us to know Him. So much does He want us to know Him that He sent Jesus to reveal His true heart to us. Jesus told His disciples that if “you have seen me, you have seen the father”. And scripture says to “Know the Father and Jesus Christ His Son, is eternal life.”
Aspect 2: God knows us and wants us to understand how deeply He knows us. Psalm 139 is so clear on that point. Over and over Jesus revealed that He “knew what was in the hearts” of the people with whom He dealt. Check this out:
13 You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body
and knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!
Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it.
15 You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion,
as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.
16 You saw me before I was born.
Every day of my life was recorded in your book.
Every moment was laid out
before a single day had passed.
17 How precious are your thoughts about me,[b] O God.
They cannot be numbered!
18 I can’t even count them;
they outnumber the grains of sand!
And when I wake up,
you are still with me!
Aspect 3: He wants to and does meet our needs and wants us to love Him back in a way that blesses Him. He wants us to love, obey, worship, and serve Him because He knows that those are the best things we could do for ourselves. Even that is a way He loves us.
When we have a love relationship with another person where we are known deeply, when we are able to get to know the other person deeply, and each of us cares for the other so much that the other person’s needs are more important than our own, that, my friend, is the goal of the relationships we see people longing to create or portray in our movies and music.
But they don’t seem to make it there, do they? No, they don’t. Usually, one person is using the other to make them feel good, look good in the eyes of others, fulfill a desire or drive that is immoral and inappropriate at the time..not yet married. Have you noticed that even if the love shown in the movie or in the lyrics of a song is a pure form of intimate love, when the cameras are off and the recordings end, those doing the performing go home to relationships that they themselves can’t duplicate in the real world? I am not happy about that. I wish they had great relationships, but I know that only God can produce the kind of love they long to experience. He can for them. He can for you. He can for me.
Starting with an intimate love relationship with Jesus Christ, Who loved us first, knows us deeply, wants us to know Him deeply, and truly meets our needs, we have a chance to experience true intimate love both now and forever.
As that love deepens and we grow even more in love with Him, we are changed to the point where we put the needs of other above our own and find love in relationships where we are open to loving and being loved on a God-focused foundation. We can have growing (not perfect) but progressively better and deeper relationships so that we can grow old and grow closer to a spouse, to family, and to friends so that our future is filled with more intimate love than our present or past days. How about that! Sounds like a theme worth developing in real life not just in a song!