Love Doesn't Work Like Money

For Christmas I got this book called Blue Like Jazz by a very wise man who goes by the name Donald Miller. It was a New York Times best seller so chances are you might have read it, but I hadn't before recently so if you haven't either I fervently encourage you to give him a chance and read what he has to say. The whole book causes you to really dig deep and take a look at the things in your life. Everything from how you worship and who you feel is worthy of love to if the Christian faith is even relevant in our culture today and that maybe believing in God could be "no more rational than having an imaginary friend." I'll probably touch on ideas from the book in the future as I feel compelled to share them here, but one chapter...one page, really...stood out to me among the other 239 of them. He's talking about this conference he attended where the speaker asked the crowd to yell out words they would use when describing relationships with people, especially those they love. The responses are things like we invest in people, value people, people can be considered priceless to us and so on and so forth. 


Then this realization came that all of these descriptive words could also be used when discussing the economy. We use love like it's money.

"And that's when it hit me like so much epiphany getting dislodged from my arteries. The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We us it like money. Professor Spencer was right, and not only was he right, I felt as though he had cured me, as though he had let me out of my cage. I could see it very clearly. If somebody is doing something, offering us something, be it gifts, time, popularity, what have you, we feel they have value, we feel they are worth something to us, and perhaps, we feel they are priceless. I could see it so clearly, and I could feel it in the pages of my life. This was the thing that had smelled so rotten all these years. I used love like money. With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who did not agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did." 

But love doesn't work like money. It never did and it never will. Love is something different. So different in fact that philosophers and psychologists and intellectuals have studied it for years trying to determine it's characteristics and boundaries. But that's what makes it so special. It doesn't have any boundaries. We try to withhold love from people we disapprove of in an effort to make them change due to our disapproval, but it just doesn't work.

"I replaced economic metaphor in my mind with something different, a free gift metaphor or a magnet metaphor. That is, instead of withholding love to change somebody, I poured it on, lavishly. I hoped that love would work like a magnet, pulling people from the mire and toward healing. I knew this was the way God loved me. God had never withheld love to teach me a lesson."

I promise you it works. I can't tell you how many people have impacted and helped heal me just by loving me. I can't tell you how much relief is found in the embrace of a friend. I think if there's one thing all people have in common it's that we want to be accepted. We need to be loved. 


I go to a Bible study on Monday nights at a house of some close friends of mine. We've been reading a book called Abba's Child by Brennan Manning. I suggest having a dictionary on hand as you tackle his writing because it's dense, but anyway. This week the chapter was about the pharisee and the child. Ours is led by my always inspiring friend Sara and she pointed out the most important parts, read them to us and explained them. The pharisee and the child are polar opposites. The pharisee is wrapped up in technicalities and laws and to them, "instead of a love story, the Bible is viewed as a detailed manual of directions." But the child "spontaneously expresses emotions." They are carelessly genuine. When they fall, they cry. Sara had us write in a journal for something like 15 minutes about what we're struggling with or maybe what we thought about the chapter. I found myself writing about all the people I love that might not know it. I actually wrote "We've been talking about feelings and whether we repress or embrace them. I think I embrace them always but show them rarely and that could be just as much as problem as suppressing them is because it means I don't always tell people how I feel about them. I wonder if they know." 


Afterwards I sent out a mass message to everyone I could think of telling them I loved them and how happy I was to be a part of their lives and have them in mine. The responses I got back were so unbelievably encouraging. Some were surprised, others told me how much they needed to hear it. Many told me how much I meant to them too which always very good to hear. I'm not sure, but I think my "love language" is words of affirmation. If you didn't get it, it doesn't mean I don't love you. It probably just means I don't have your number. And if you did get it and you're reading this, and suddenly feel less special because it wasn't specifically just for you  -don't. Because out of all of the people in my life your name crossed my mind when I was thinking of people I love. 


I have a lot of people in my life that "awkward it up" as Chase would say when emotions come in to play. I think I learned at some point to not hug them, to not tell them I love them in an effort to not make them, or myself, uncomfortable. But I should be doing the complete opposite. I know that now and I can't wait to stop using love like it's money. I think everybody is guilty of it in some form or another, but just think about how pretty the world would look if we didn't do that.