W8D5: What Is Love

"The person who does not love does not know God, because God is love." 1 John 4:8 NET

Someone once said that unmet expectations are the mother of all frustration. Most of the pain, heartache and suffering we have is birthed from our expectations that someone didn’t live up to. People disappoint us, they hurt us with their words, actions or even inactions. We don’t expect to be rejected; we don’t expect for others to not be there when we need them. It’s so painful. 

Each time we’re hurt by others the cut goes a little deeper. After a while, our hearts are simply a mass of scars that have forgotten how to beat with the rhythm of love, mercy and peace. We begin to have a warped sense of what love really is because of our unmet expectations.

When we hurt, we want the pain to go away. Often, we see someone in pain and we try to help them in the way we would want to be helped. We keep in touch to encourage them with our presence and our words. We do things for them, cook them meals or buy them little gifts. We look for acts of kindness to do in an effort to help them through a rough patch.

If we are not careful, we will set ourselves up for unmet expectations. We will expect the people in our lives to be there for us like we were for them. We expect them to show us the attention, concern and love that we showed them. When they don’t, we are devastated, broken and hurt. We become jaded toward others. We say things and do things in the midst of our pain that hurt the very people we want to love us. We irreparably damage those relationships because words and actions cannot be taken back.

The problem is that we think we know what love is, but we probably don’t. We may know what the human definition of love is, but we struggle with God’s definition of love.

Love is like everything else in this way: in order to give it, we must first have it. If our neighbor needs a cup of sugar but we don’t have it, we can’t give it to them. It’s the same with the way we love/help others. We give them what we have and expect them to give it in return when we are in need. If we go to our neighbor, asking them for a cup of sugar and they say they are out of it, we probably won’t get bent out of shape about it.

We understand when our neighbor doesn’t have the ingredient we need. But what we fail to understand is that people often lack the love and the ability to help in the way we want. Each of us is a unique creation, we don’t have the same thoughts, perceptions, reactions or responses. Our situations, circumstances and timetables are all different. That means the way we would act in a situation is not the way someone else would react. Reactions may be similar, but never exactly the same. If they are broken, they will not have the ability to love well, that’s for sure.

If we don’t trust our neighbor, if we believe they have sugar and are holding out on us, we will probably get upset. We may think that way because they always appear to have a “well-stocked” kitchen or we have caught them in a lie in the past. We may think it because we have withheld things we have from people we don’t like. If that is true, we may get our feelings hurt because we think they have it, they just don’t want to give it to us because they don’t like us. Our expectations of others cause a lot of heartache.

Can you think of times you were hurt because you had unmet expectations about other people? Have there been times you’ve been hurt because someone has treated you in the same way you have treated others you don’t like?

Meditate on 1John 4:8