don miller and love's torture

I’m reading Don Miller’s Searching for God Knows What a second time. I’m reading it with a group of friends we call our book club. Everyone who knows me knows I love Don Miller’s writing. This book is no exception. I love this book.

But I have just come across a paragraph that’s really got me thinking, and I’m thinking that Don’s got it backward. I bet if I sat down with Don and told him what I was thinking he would listen. And I bet he wouldn’t discount me because I’m not a published writer like him. He might even rethink what he wrote. At least I think he would enjoy the discussion.

I just finished reading about Adam, Eve, and the Alien, and then about the Lifeboat. Now he’s talking about Jesus, and the subtitle is, Who needs a lifeboat? He’s talking about how Jesus must have really liked people, and I think that’s true. Then he talks about how Jesus never wrote a manifesto or a mission statement or anything for that matter, but instead put all his eggs in his followers’ baskets. And that’s really, really amazing when you think about it because it’s a precarious way to start a religion, and would Jesus even be taken serious in today’s world if he wasn’t published? And then Don talks about the impact Jesus had on people, how they went and lived amazing lives full of passion and dedication to the point of death for him. I don’t know who could argue with that observation, even if they’re not a Christian. And then he comes to this paragraph, the paragraph I can’t accept:

People don’t go out and get tortured and arrested for somebody who doesn’t love them. If somebody loves us we will do all kinds of things in their name, for them, because of them. They will make us who we are.

But I don’t think that’s true. It’s backwards actually. The truth is that people go out and get tortured all the time for somebody who doesn’t love them. Unrequited love is almost a proverb. I personally know of several instances where someone loves someone so much it hurts, but the object of their affection is not moved at all, and sometimes is even freaked out by their love. The truth is that some people cannot accept love, and some people can accept love, but cannot accept love from certain people. I think some of the time it’s because people cannot recognize love. It was certainly true in Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth was repulsed at the very name of Mr. Darcy throughout the story. But in the end she discovered his love, and in the end she discovered her own love as well. If you see one of the movies or read the book you’ll know what I mean. It’s really quite moving. I can see why so many women like it.

People do get themselves tortured for somebody who doesn’t love them.

But that’s only half of how I think what Don wrote is backwards. The other half is that if somebody loves us we will do all kinds of things in their name, for them, because of them. That’s not really true, either. The truth is not that if we feel loved we will die for someone else. The truth is that if we love someone else we will die for them. We will do all kinds of things in their name, for them, because of them. We will lose sleep. We will write their name a million times on the cover of our geometry text book. We will spend hundreds of dollars a month on long distance phone calls. We will waste a small fortune on gasoline on trips to see them, or even just to drive by their house in hopes that we might see them when they go out to check their mail. If something goes wrong we will spend weeks going through correspondence and retracing our steps to create a timeline of events that led up to the catastrophe to figure out what went wrong when. We will pluck daisies. The truth is not that if someone loves us we will go the distance. The truth is that if we love someone we will go the distance. No price is too great when we are in love.

If we love someone we’re liable to do anything.

And this was the real secret of the Christ movement, in my way of thinking. It’s not that he loved his disciples so much that they turned the world upside down. It’s that they loved him so much that they turned the world upside down. Somehow that ancient romantic, irrational, desperate current swept them off their feet into something much bigger than could be written or explained or campaigned. They didn’t enlist in a school of discipleship. They fell in love.

So after disagreeing with Don in both directions, I want to savor his last sentence. They will make us who we are. The problem with falling in love with someone is that they will make us who we are. It quite cancels the life our guidance counselor helped us to identify and make plans for. It makes us who we are because it defines the object of our attention. It dictates where our time is spent. Without any discipline or planning at all it propels us to “have done with lesser things”. It makes us who we are by reorienting our priorities around the one who matters, the one we can’t let fall, can’t let go of. And ultimately, that makes us who we are.

To me this makes a lot of sense when I read what some of those disciples wrote. It does make me look at their letters differently, though. When I think about what they did and with what fervor they did it, I can only explain it as them being in love with someone. What they did goes beyond reason, certainly beyond what reasonable people would do. They turned the world upside down, and they did it because they were in love with someone, someone that it was only fitting for them to call Lord, someone who had captivated them. So then their letters have become to me more their defense of themselves, their explanation of their own actions, their own fervor. John called himself, “the one whom Jesus loved” in the hope that he would be excused for his radical behavior, his radical love of the dear woman and her children and all the others for whom he was tortured or exiled. And Paul wrote, “That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet I am not ashamed, because I know whom I have believed…” Paul actually wrote more than a few times the phrase, “I am not ashamed”. Peter defended his love by saying, “We did not follow cleverly invented stories… we were with him on the sacred mountain.” The thing is, it’s not what these guys wrote that was so powerful. It was their lives. The New Testament is this eclectic collection of theology, plus personal items that frankly belong in a journal, greetings, personal appeals, apologies, poetry, lyrics, and other stuff. The real power was in the writers’ lives. It was each of their lives that said loud and clear, “Love. It’s the only way.” It said it better than any song or poem or epistle ever could. Christ had captivated them. They had fallen in love with Him. They went on to live fanatically—not fanatically as crusaders trying to subject the rest of the world to their new religious order, but fanatically as a lover can’t help but pursue his beloved and everything his beloved loves. It was in that process, whether intentional or not, that they turned the world upside down. The writing was mainly to answer questions about all that energy being kicked off by their fanatical love and the effect it was having on the world. I know maybe it sounds weird for a bunch of men to fall in love with another man, but it happens. Especially when said man loved them so purely and so deeply from the start.

Finally, I saw again the other day the words that I think are so stupid. I was driving by the big Baptist church in Fort Worth on I30, and I saw on their marquee, “We love God because he first loved us.” It’s a misquote from 1 John 4:19. It’s a terrible misquote, because you can’t even make the case that you’re inserting God in there for clarity. Inserting God there actually changes the meaning. It’s quite simply, “We love because he first loved us.” You can look it up in your favorite Bible version. It’s what it says.

And this ties in nicely with what Don wrote, because it is true that we are able to love others because God lavished us with his love. There is something so comforting about being loved. There is something that provides so much security and warmth in knowing that you are loved. It’s not that we would die for someone if they loved us. What we would die for is the one we love. We would extinguish all that is our life for the object of our love. It’s not that we would die for someone once they loved us. It’s that we are able to love others once someone really loved us. It’s quite liberating to be loved, when you can accept it, that is. Once Elizabeth could accept that Mr. Darcy had done everything for her, she could then quit focusing on herself and all her complaints and just love everyone else from her heart. It was quite time consuming for her until then.

Somehow Christ, like Darcy, was able to captivate his beloved. Somehow he was able to do more than extend his love to her and earn her gratitude. Somehow he was able to turn her heart to love him back. And that is where all this came from.