Why I am Waiting to Say "I Love You"

They’re the four letters every girl dreams of. You know, the word uttered from the mouth of Prince Charming at the moment he realizes that his life cannot go on without his one true…

LOVE. “I love you,” the strapping blond prince says…and he and his beauty live happily ever after.

“Love,” a simple word full of an innumerable amount of undeniable complexities. Musicians, writers, poets, artists, film-makers, and playwrights spend inordinate amounts of time musing over these complexities in an attempt to transform the inexplicable in to something tangible. Children and adults alike are saturated with these attempts through various forms of media and grow up hopeful that one day their very own Romeo or Juliet will sweep them off their feet. We spend our lives looking for “Happily Ever After”; we wait impatiently for our very own glass slipper, bouquets of flowers and those three monosyllabic words. After all, “All you need is love, love is all you need.”

LOVE. LOVE. LOVE. Not a day goes by that I don’t use this four-letter word at least thirty times. “I love Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream”; “I love the smell of sunscreen”; “I love it when I get to go to bed early.” I think we can all acknowledge that the word could not be more overused. I find it ironic that the English language uses the same word to describe the pleasure that results from eating a piece of cheese (“Oh, wow. I love this gouda!”), to describe profound adoration for and commitment to a spouse (“Christina, I love you from the bottom of my heart”). Cheese. Spouse. Weird, no?

Then there is the whole issue of dissecting the way that love is portrayed in the media. Behind all the sweet words, red roses, Hallmark cards and boxes of chocolate often lies a love rooted, not in self-sacrifice, but in selfish desires. Take, for example, the popular “love song,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by The Beatles: “And when I touch you I feel happy inside.” Let’s get things straight, I love (notice the use of the word) this song. However, you can’t deny that selfish desires exist behind these and many other all-too-famous lyrics. Were we to delve into a discussion about movies, we would discover that often, the romantic onscreen “love” that brings tears to viewers’ eyes and causes hearts everywhere to flutter actually represents nothing but lust. Yes, that’s right, lust.

So, what is love? I have many questions when it comes to the meaning of this little four-letter word. However, one thing to which I can attest is that candy, flowers, prince charming, jewelry, saying “I love you”, romantic dinners, and sex are not necessarily synonymous with love; in fact, these very misunderstandings of the word, fed to us by the media, lead us in a completely different direction. Coming from a girl who grew up with dreams of becoming Cinderella, this can be a difficult thing to swallow. So, in which direction do we turn? How do we even begin to understand the meaning of love? Out of everything I believe, of this I am most certain. In order to understand love, we must turn to the cross.

Romans 5:8: “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

God loves us. To demonstrate this love, he sacrifices his son as atonement for our sins. In Sex God, Rob Bell references Ephesians, chapter 5 in explaining what it means to love another: “So the teaching of the passage in Ephesians is to love and serve the people around you, placing their needs ahead of your own, out of respect and reverence for Jesus, who gave his life for us, the ultimate act of love and sacrifice. Die to yourselves, so that others can live. Like Jesus” (Bell 114).

Love = sacrifice. It’s as simple as that. Well, maybe not so simple. It’s a little less daunting to go to the supermarket, pick up a bouquet of flowers and a card, and give them as a sign of your “love” than it is to be willing to sacrifice your own life for the person you love. But maybe love is not meant to be easy. I believe that the beauty of love lies in the challenges it brings. It tests you and your significant other to seek out God’s guidance as you learn what it means to truly love one another. In doing so, you place God at the center of your relationship and learn to grow together spiritually. It asks you to take a risk, to move beyond your own selfish desires and discover what it means to put another before yourself. It requires you to disregard the ways in which the media portrays love and abandon your understanding of love as a fairy tale. Put simply, it asks you to be like Jesus.

So why am I waiting to say, “I love you”? I have to admit, part of me is quite stubborn. I have great trouble using the same word to describe my feelings towards a man and my feelings towards ice cream. With no chance of the English language suddenly changing, I am hopeful that I can one day see past this minor frustration. More so than this, however, I am on a lifelong journey to discover exactly what it means to love another. I cannot yet fully grasp the sacrifice that love entails, but I am constantly seeking God’s guidance in understanding the true meaning of the word. Additionally, I wish to challenge myself to learn how to show someone I love him rather than simply tell someone I love him. After all, Christ does not need to tell us he loves us. The cross says enough.


Sources:
Rob Bell, Sex God (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2007)

by Kelsey Y.