Oh never leave me
My darling,
I can’t live without you . . .
Do you recognize the familiar message in my little song lyric? “You (human person) are my total all,” “You (human unpredictable person) give me breath and life,” and “Without you (human fallible person) I simply can’t go on.” We hear this message every day in music, the media, books, movies, culture, and the very air we breathe.
I’m a fan of opera. I sob my heart out when Tosca, crying hysterically, realizes her lover, Mario, has been shot dead and then leaps off the wall of the tower of Castel San Angelo to her own death. And no matter how many times I see Madame Butterfly, I fall apart when Cio-Cio San plunges the dagger into her heart. These people die for human love. You’ll see more people die for love on the opera stage than anywhere else, except perhaps in a Shakespearean play. What could be more sad than poor Romeo and Juliet lying dead in their youth, the whole world lamenting? Human love is passionately sad and tragic, and opera plays on our emotions to demonstrate that truth with artistic magnification. Human love is frail, fickle, and (gasp) deadly.
I saw the opera La Bohème for the first time as a young girl at the Paris opera house. I was by myself and had a box seat. I was so thrilled and excited to see Puccini’s La Bohème in Paris that I arrived an hour early. I wore a really cute dress and sat enthralled from the first notes of the overture to the final act. But at the very end of the opera, that last moment when Rodolfo lets loose with a final cry of anguish, “Mimi!” for his dead loved one, I was so caught up with emotion that I nearly flew out of the box. I was absolutely overcome! Tears streamed down my face onto my really cute dress. I had only one tissue in my purse, and I was simply a wreck. When I leapt to my feet to applaud and shout bravos with the ecstatic French audience, I was dizzy. My knees trembled beneath me, and I could hardly breathe.
Poor Rodolfo. Poor Mimi. Human love. It’ll kill you.
I’m talking about human love. Romantic love is in our DNA. We love it and long for it. God programmed us for romantic love, but He also programmed us for a love that goes deeper than romance. It’s possible to live a beautifully rich and happy life without romantic love, but it’s not possible to live a beautifully rich and happy life without the love of God. Romantic love is largely dependent on emotions, and we can live on the energy of our emotions for only so long. Human emotions aren’t dependable. Art and life teach us that.
When Christ loves in us and through us, we’re lifted to an entirely different plateau of human life. This is called agape love, and it can be attained and known only through Him. It’s selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love that we’re free to accept or reject. Someone who has this love voluntarily suffers inconvenience, discomfort, and even death for the benefit of another without expecting anything in return. Agape love isn’t based on emotions, and it motivates us for action. The New Testament contains over two hundred references to this kind of love. “Therefore be imitators of God as dear children. And walk in love [agape], as Christ also has loved [agaped] us” (Eph. 5:1–2).
Do all lovers love one another with agape love? Of course not. If all happiness in the world depended on our loving God the way He loves us, it would be a miserable world because the world doesn’t love God the way He asks us to. We experience love and happiness in the world because God loves the world.
The Loveless Place
Human love exists because God’s love permeates the atoms and protons and nuclei of the world. Our life on earth with all that the earth offers is ours because God loves His world and He loves humanity. The sun rises on the evil and on the good, and rain falls on the just and the unjust (Matt. 5:45), so monk and felon alike enjoy the warmth of warm hugs and a sunny day.
The horror of hell as described in the Bible is that it’s a place without so much as a hint of love. If a human soul rejects God and His love, naturally that soul will be drawn to, and become attached to, that which is godless. That’s why the Bible tells us, “Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve” (Josh. 24:15). Being without God doesn’t mean you’ll never enjoy goodness or happiness. These are possible without Him, of course, but they are contingent upon human ability, circumstances, environment, social situation, and luck, and they’re not permanent. This book is about lasting happiness.
It stands to reason that those who choose shallow lives without God on earth will be drawn to an eternal spirit soul that matches theirs. That spirit soul is the ruler of hell, the devil, and he’s prepared to lure and devour any human he can, and he does this first of all through the mind. “As he thinks in his heart, so he is” (Prov. 23:7). The devil wants your mind corrupted for hell.
The eternal soul who remains separated from God at death will, of course, remain separated from God after passing from this life. It’s tragic because, once landing in hell, that soul will discover that whatever good they knew of life on earth was due to the love of God, whom they rejected. He can’t be found in hell. Not even a glimpse of Him. God is love, and in hell there’s no love. If your pursuit is to be in love, it’s not love you seek; it’s the Author of love.
Love versus Need
Lila talks about her marriage to her surgeon husband. “I feel like our marriage is all about him, not us. I worked two jobs for six years to put him through medical school. I literally wore myself ragged taking care of him. I’m still wearing myself out for him. Still taking care of him. My mother always told me if you make someone need you, they’ll never leave you. I took her advice.”
God intended for us to be whole and healthy human beings in ourselves, able to give the sweetest and best of ourselves to others. If you fill your inner self with a person, before you realize it, dependence sneaks up on you in the guise of love and, as in Lila’s case, traps you in an all-about-the-other-person situation. Erich Fromm, in his classic book The Art of Loving, says, “We need to understand that we can only achieve love when we can stand alone as singly whole and secure persons. . . . Mature love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality.”1 We’re in trouble when we’re incapable of standing alone in our integrity to freely love.
The first step in understanding how to love is to look at what you believe about love. What do you believe about love? Write it down in your happiness journal. Write what you don’t believe about love. We’re going to talk more about your ideas of love, but let’s look first at the power of beliefs.
Some people believe that wearing garlic around their necks wards off colds and flu. Others believe drinking warm milk and garlic will ward off anything (and anyone, for that matter). We’ve heard we can get smarter by eating fish, stronger by eating spinach, thinner by eating grapefruit, and taller by taking our calcium.
The African Ashanti eat the hearts of their enemies because they believe doing so will give them courage. The Abipone of Paraguay believe eating jaguar flesh will give them speed. The Miri of Assam eat tigers to make themselves fierce.
What you believe dictates everything you do. Can you distinguish truth from error? From misbelief?
We’ve heard the heartsick, love-struck songs, and we’re told that people who need people are lucky people. And then there’s this touching thought: “I love you so much I could die.” We’re ready to buy into anything as long as it’s in the name of something called love. We’re too eager to accept false sentimentality and suffering and call it caring. It’s good to be connected and a part of a caring world, but to be needy and desperate for love opens us up to abuse and unhappiness that could take years and even a lifetime to undo.
Love doesn’t wound. Love doesn’t drive you nuts. Love makes you more beautiful than you were before you found it. Love lifts you up to your best self. The essence of love is the ability to offer happiness to another. You can’t offer happiness if you don’t have happiness, just like you can’t offer blessing if you aren’t living in blessing.
With all respect to Lila’s mother, her advice to her daughter to make her husband need her was not good advice. Need is not love, and God created us to be loved. After thirty years of being cared for by Lila, her spoiled and pampered husband left her for another woman.
Need can destroy a perfectly decent couple. They inflict pain on each other like unchaperoned children. Addicted to each other, they can’t live without each other, yet they despise each other. If they continue with their addiction, they will destroy themselves and each other.
If you make somebody need you to the point where their well-being depends on you, that person will begin to dislike you and eventually hate you.
To believe people can fulfill our every need is about as realistic as believing that eating human hearts will give us courage and eating jaguar flesh will give us speed. We might consider such beliefs ignorant, but we treat our relationships with the same ignorance.
Writer James Thurber wrote that we are “brought up without being able to tell love from sex, Snow White, or Ever After. We think it [love] is a push button solution or instant cure for discontent and a sure road to happiness. By our sentimental ignorance we encourage marriage as a kind of tranquilizing drug.”2
A loveaholic is
The people who need drugs to feel good, caffeine to wake up, liquor to calm down, or a person to love them or need them in order to feel self-worth are unable to enter into the courts of lasting happiness. Happiness for them is fickle, easily dropped, and, like certain washable fabrics, quick to fade.
A major difference between someone who shows godly love and a loveaholic is that the loveaholic is not a giver. The loveaholic is a taker, even though they think they are a giver.
Love and Self-Worth
The ability to know our worth because we’re loved by God has been maligned. We need to take a good, hard look at ourselves and the world that influences us. What does “I love you” really mean?
We treat love as though it existed somewhere apart from us, as though it falls on us from out of nowhere or we fall into it. I once heard the comedian Rita Rudner quip, “I’ve never fallen in love, but I’ve stepped in it a few times.”
We know very little about love, and yet we’re its slave. If we spend energy worrying about what we don’t have and what’s missing in our lives, we’re ready for the loveaholic hotline. We’ll look for someone else to boost our sense of worth, and we’ll be ready to work hard to earn love and approval. Our misguided expectations are that we’ll be rewarded for our hard work. It’s time to discover how strong and beautiful we really are without anyone cheering us on and telling us what we want to hear.
Love between friends, spouses, siblings, co-workers, and fellow believers requires equal footing. When you lift someone up higher than you so that you feel subservient to them, examine your motive. When you choose someone beneath you to intimidate and control, examine your motive. Both of these instances demonstrate low self-esteem. Compare how you feel and act with someone who is on equal footing with you, with whom you feel right at home. What’s the difference?
Your sense of worth and being a truly happy person depend on a foundational understanding of how you see yourself in God’s eyes. This takes effort and awareness. Your authentic happy life does not rest in how others see and love you. Climb inside your heart and take a deep, penetrating look at what’s inside. Inner work includes learning to sort through your needs to discard those that are destructive.
Change “I need you to love me the way I want to be loved!” to “I want to love you the way you want to be loved.” (The word need is gone.)
Change “I need you to show me more attention” to “I want to show you loving attention because you deserve it, and I know you’ll do the same for me.” (Again, the word need is gone.)
Change your behavior and you change your life. Develop more meaningful ways of communicating by dropping accusations and demands. Put an end to the loveaholic reign of chaos and misery.
Lessons in Love
We learned our first lessons in love as children through our parents’ approval or disapproval. We learned from their doting as well as their abuse. We learned from their indifference and abandonment as well as their caring and sharing. Our parents taught us about a world in which we must now decide how to live. They taught us what human love is and what it’s not. Those early experiences, no matter how awful or good, influenced us, but the past is not our master.
Maybe your life now isn’t as much fun as it was when you were a child, and you miss those sweet, happy years. Kenneth Grahame, the beloved author of many children’s books, including Wind in the Willows, worked in a bank, and nostalgic for his happy childhood, he wrote down ideas for stories in his bank ledgers. Grahame published several wonderful books glorifying childhood. He was someone who saw childhood as a pleasure.
But perhaps your childhood was a nightmare you want to forget. If that is the case, the wounds of the past belong in the past. Often the most difficult task we face is ending our connection with the past and moving on to the joys and challenges of the present. It’s common to treat the people in our lives today as if they were the ones who betrayed us or hurt us in the past. It’s way too common not to trust today because of hurts we’ve gone through in the past.
Love is complicated, and we need to use all of our efforts and resources to create and maintain stable, constructive, beautiful relationships. Allowing your past a major role in any relationship is a mistake because it’s the present, not your past, that holds the key to your future. Here are some pointers to help you overcome the past:
Write the following seven power statements in your happiness journal:
These are powerful statements to remind yourself of every day. Don’t remain stagnant or tangled in messed-up thinking. God’s love is working and forming a new you; He’s carving out an image of Himself in you. He says, “I accept you as you are. My wholeness creates wholeness in you.”
True Love
In my book Of Whom the World Was Not Worthy, which takes place in former Yugoslavia, I wrote the true account of Jozeca and Jakob, a love story that exemplifies “love me for who I am and I will love you for who you are.” This husband and wife went through World War II, prison, the birth of children, sickness, poverty, bitter cold, and hunger, and through it all, their love flourished. They lived in a world that was hostile and raging with war, death, and hunger, and their love had to stand alone, without outside encouragement. They had to be strong and sane. Integrity and equality were vital if they were to survive.
The loveaholic has little interest in the world outside their own small needs. The loveaholic shouts, “I can’t get no satisfaction,” and therein is the misconception that love originates and ends with frail and solipsistic human beings. It doesn’t.
Here’s a test for you to take to see how you measure up as a lover. Answer each of the following questions as honestly as you can. The “loved one” in the test can be a husband, wife, best friend, parent, son, or daughter—anyone you love.
Give yourself 2 points for every yes answer and score yourself as follows:
24–22 points: You’re a lover who no doubt leads an exemplary life of nurturing and caring.
20–18 points: You could be in danger of hurting yourself and hurting someone else. Stop now and tell yourself, “I am a person of value. My loved one is a person of value. None of our thoughts or hearts are more precious than the other’s. I choose to see us both as precious in the sight of God, and I refuse to put either of us down in any way, be it by action, word, or thought.”
16 points or less: I know you’re hurting. Go back to the seven power statements in this chapter and repeat them daily. Reread this chapter and tell yourself, “I am changing.” Accept the fact that God wants your happiness and well-being because He loves you.
We need to love one another for who we are and stop demanding that others be what we neurotically think we need them to be. We need to stop our insistence that our loved ones fulfill a vacant hole in us. We need to see that what we believe to be passionate love may only be proof of our neediness and our loneliness.
According to 1 Corinthians 13:5, love doesn’t seek its own. Love must seek God! If we don’t know what love is, we’re perpetually trying to find ways to gratify ourselves outside of God. We search for and grasp at people, things, and relationships, but we never find true love because love isn’t self-centered. Love seeks not its own. A loveaholic is basically a self-centered, self-seeking person trying to find happiness through the commodity of love. But love is not a commodity for personal enrichment.
The word for loving-kindness in Hebrew is hesed, interpreted as “faithful love in action.” It appears thirty times in the King James Old Testament, twenty-three times in the book of Psalms. It’s a word with immense meaning because it surpasses general love or compassion. The word is relational, not general. It expresses a relationship with God. David understood that God’s loving-kindness is better than life (Ps. 63:3) because he wasn’t just an observer. He had a deep relationship with God.
The word hesed speaks of God’s eternal covenant with Israel and with us who love Him. (A covenant is a promise, a legally binding divine document that can’t be broken.) Hesed expresses God’s loyalty and faithfulness to keep His promises. The Lord’s loving-kindness indeed never ends, for His compassions never fail (Lam. 3:22). Hesed also means, because it’s relational, that we, God’s loved ones, are to be actively involved in His loving-kindness.
In the New Testament where the Greek word eleos is used for loving-kindness, it means “mercy.” It’s God’s kindness and goodwill toward those who suffer. When we set ourselves free from a loveaholic mentality and lifestyle, we can shake ourselves off and start giving to others the benefits we experience as favored by God.
We float sweetly in the cool, clear waters of forgiveness, and God’s eleos, His divine mercy, removes our guilt and shame. This is why Jesus proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain [divine] mercy” (Matt. 5:7). He wants us to show the same mercy toward everyone as He shows toward us. Reach outside yourself and your own human ability to show compassion and concern for someone in need. The apostle Paul never stopped interceding for others even when he was being persecuted. “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” he said (Acts 20:35). That’s the real you—a lover and a giver.
Before I leave this idea of hesed, let me suggest it as a fabulous way to start your day. The idea of mercy often occurs with morning in Scripture. Take a look for yourself. Check out these passages: Psalm 59:16; 90:14; 92:2; 143:8; Hosea 6:4; Lamentations 3:22–23. Praise God for His love to you, His beloved, each morning.
As you gain true love, you’ll see your actions becoming more loving and outgoing, never vindictive or spiteful. Accept your new vulnerability. Plan to do and say loving things by writing them down.
You’re a person born to love and be loved. It’s how you were created by God. Love is in your DNA. Be at home with this fact. To violate love, distort it, tamper with its sanctity, abuse it, and manufacture something else in its name will always bring discord, disharmony, and ultimately misery. It takes effort to truly understand in the depths of our souls who we are and why we’re here, and to know lasting happiness in a world that doesn’t value the love of God. When you begin to weed out the negative hurts and lies and tear down the loveaholic walls of neediness, the true light of pure love will always shine through into your life. See yourself today through God’s eyes as his child fully loved, born to give and share that love.