To the untrained heart instruments of love sound like instruments of destruction. To a whole heart, the only song you can sing is one of love. This is because instruments are not inherently good or evil, afterall they only sing songs that you choose to play. A pen is just a beholder of ink, and a blade is simply sharp. Music is a holy language, harnessed by instruments, and molded by man.
Much like love in the same way is a holy language, harnessed by instruments, and molded by man. Such is every core essence of existence, in it’s true form it is holy, then corrupted or utilized by man. All good songs and stories balance two eternal forces, chaos & order. In music it is the dance between major and minor, in love it is intimacy and pain, in a good story it is tension and resolution.
This is the dance between order and chaos that breeds wonder, meaning, and purpose. A naive heart doesn’t care for a minor chord, a major challenge, uneasy tension, or the concept of chaos. I want to challenge that naive heart here today by introducing a bit of chaos to it, because a naive heart is prone to much anxiety. It is the blood that washes white. It is the cross that loves. It is the stripes that heal. Because no masterpiece witholds the minor, and no love is intoxicatingly and suffocatingly affectionate to the point of overwhelming euphoria all the time.
God is love, the ultimate example of true love, yet he allows us to suffer. In his love for us we experience pain, question, doubt, and cry out to the heavens for justice. He allows us to touch the fire for ourselves and get burnt, to scrape our knees on the sidewalk, and to fall off the slides of life to figure out what life without his love really is like. How could a loving father do such a thing? Precisely because he is loving. True love lets you hurt, it gives you the choice, and it allows you to reject. The alternative is a suffocating and all-sovereign tyrannical kind of love that does not let you breathe elsewhere. It is the difference between tyranny, and toxic parenting.
Not only that, but true love will bite. It will keep you in line, it will rebuke you when you are wrong, and it will allow you to get burned if you choose the fire. True love is contingent on the wholeness of the two souls, they cannot be naive in heart, otherwise when one bites the other they will point fingers and blame instead of repenting and reconciling. They will build idols and offer sacrifices to them instead, they will force their affection when judgement is necessary.
This is the dynamic of love between Israel and Yahweh, the naive Israel and the wholeness of God. The husband and the bride. It is covenental love, not childish affection. When does love become play, and intimacy allow affection? When love becomes holy, and only then. Otherwise your love is no different than an addict and his pill, a musician and his pride, or a sadist and his blade. People who become lost in what is meant to be holy, tainting it with their over indulgence instead of enjoying it with wisdom.
When you love a naive heart properly, it feels like pain. Rebuke feels like tyranny, and correction like control. A whole and wise heart accepts correction in repentance, and aims toward keeping the covenant.
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