Tuesday 19 May - You complete me…

DAILY BYTE

As we put the gritty reality back into love, let’s first address romantic love because that’s where all our minds immediately wander when the topic of love arises, anyway.

In high school I can remember being absolutely enamored with the movie Jerry Maguire, where Tom Cruise tells Renee Zellweger: “I love you…you complete me.” How romantic. He’s found his other half, so now because of what one person gives the other person, together they can live one full, complete life…

Even if we’re not so obvious about it, we do seem constantly to be on a search for what other people in life can give us in relationships. The prince rescues Cinderella, seeing that she has all the beauty he wants, and he offers her all the riches she’s been denied, and they are whisked away into a life that we don’t get to see but we’re meant to believe is a life where they have completed one another – so this is love… This is what makes life divine?

In the movie A Mirror has Two Faces, Barbra Streisand comments that they never tell you “Cinderella drove the Prince crazy with her obsessive need to clean the castle.”

And Babs is right. Our concepts of romantic love are incomplete in the way we focus so intensely on how others must give us what we want and what we perceive we need and must fill in our personal feelings of incomplete-ness. Now, this is not to say that all our desires are bad, or that we are without needs, or even that our lives are complete, in and of ourselves. But it is to say that perhaps we must spend time reevaluating our “What a girl wants” culture, moving away from Cinderella and closer to scripture.

I’m in that period in life when literally everyone and their mother is getting married. And so I often ask my married friends and mentors questions about their relationships. Frequently, it seems, that the saying is true: “Love is blind, but marriage is an eye-opener.” Because it seems that marriage calls not for the kind of Cinderella-ish “being in love” that we’ve described - the kind of love that expects the other person to come to the table with their fifty percent of the offering one hundred percent of the time so that both peoples’ needs will constantly be satisfied by what they get from the other person. That’s romance.

Now, I’m not dismissing some of the traditional ways cultures have taught us to be “romantic” because after all, those ideas of giving things like flowers and chocolates were derived from people learning how to show love and affection to one another – things that the world could definitely stand for more of. But, romance is thin – incomplete – if it is just a momentary show of affection without lasting depth beneath it.

Loving marriage is not just about surface level romance. It’s about agape love.

Agape love is a journey, spanning into an eternity – far longer than the life of a rose. It’s about loving even when the other person can give zero percent. It’s about gratefully absorbing the days when you are the one receiving 100 percent and giving nothing, and it’s about delighting in the sparse times when equal giving is shared.

It’s unfair that we receive more than we deserve, and it’s unfair that we have to give more than we think we are able. But, that’s love, and that’s life.

Do you try to complete yourself with other things and people? How might God’s concept of agape love alter your relationships?

GUIDING SCRIPTURE

John 15:9-12 (NRSV)

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

PRAY AS YOU GO

Loving God,

You have loved us even when we have been unable to love ourselves and others. Help us allow you to complete us today and every day. Amen.