Come Awake

In the last section, we discovered that the clearest standard for authentic love is not our own experience, our emotions, or even another person's words. The clearest standard for authentic love is Jesus Christ. Yet if Christ is our standard, why is answering the question, Does he love me? still so difficult? The answer lies, at least in part, in the complexity of loving as human beings. One of the greatest challenges in discerning authentic love is that we are not comparing Christ with Christ. We are trying to understand imperfect human beings in the light of the perfect love of God. Every one of us longs to love and to be loved. We were created for love because we were created in the image of a God who is love. Yet every one of us loves imperfectly. We all have wounds, fears, blind spots, sinful tendencies, and unhealthy patterns that influence both the way we love and the way we perceive love. Only God loves perfectly. Recognizing this protects us from expecting perfection from...