Love is a wonderful gift the Lord has given us. It is not only a gift, but a command. God commands us to "love your neighbors as yourself" (Galatians 5:14) and to "love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind" (Matthew 22:37). All our heart, soul, and mind sounds to me like obsession. The Lord created us to love Him and if we do not give our love to Him, our spirits will find something/someone else to cast that love onto.

Love, the way God intended it, looks like a gorgeous mural, so beautiful, fulfilling, purposeful and complete. Love, the way we chase it, tends to look like a coat of paint that we continually try to touch and peel before it is even dry. We continually try to awaken love before its time, we consistently become impatient and do not trust the process, we want immediate results and miss the quiet whispers from God, we peel the paint before it has a chance to become a grand mural. Love, the way that we tend to view it, generally would be considered lust.

When we obsess over love, we typically obsess over this idea of perfect love and end up chasing these mirages that never turn out to be what we hoped. Boyfriends, girlfriends, wives, husbands...we try to find fulfillment in these humans who are just as fragile, weak, and imperfect as ourselves and come up short every once in a while. We paint this picture perfect idea of what love is and when it is not this, we are angry with love. This skews our vision of love and of trust as well. We become hurt by what our "love" could not accomplish for us and we fear trusting again.

When we obsess over love, it is all we talk about, want to be around and is generally how others identify us. We wake up thinking about it, we go to bed thinking about it, we somehow find a way to turn conversation around to be about it, we rearrange our schedules to be with the other person even if it interferes with truly more important things. When we are obsessed with love, we wait on the other person and put off our own responsibilities and desires just in case the other person calls or wants to spend time together. People generally know us by who we are dating or married to or they immediately associate us with the other person.

To an extent, some of these are healthy signs of love. Sacrifice and identity are essential aspects of love; sacrificing time and desires for the person you love does happen and you may be associated with the other person in others' minds, but this should not be consistent in terms of you losing who you are for that person. There is a crucial part of marriage that requires you and your spouse to become one, but that does not mean you lose your individuality. Click here to read my article on having your identity be founded in Christ. You are still a human being, a child of God, an intricate creation that the Lord designed with individual traits, passions and purposes that should not be lost because of a relationship with any other person.

Love, as DiMarco points out, is more about giving than getting. The Lord so loved us that He gave His only Son. He gave because He loves. Although love can be romanticized by movies, media, books, quotes and pictures, love at its core is about sacrificing and can be really quite difficult to carry out at times. 1 Corinthians 13 is a popularly quoted chapter on love, but the interesting notion about this chapter is that love does not sound very 'romantic' here. It talks about the importance of (correct) love, stating that if we have everything in the world, but have not love, we are nothing. Love in this chapter is illustrated as patient, kind, not envious or boastful, not arrogant nor rude, not self-seeking, not easily angered, keeps no record of wrongs, does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth, it never fails, always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love sounds hard and not so fun all the time. Love is not always about our significant other that we dote upon at all hours of every day, love is about dealing with difficult situations and frustrating people. Love is about trusting our Creator even when we do not comprehend what is going on in our lives.

So, I go back to my original point. Love is a beautiful gift, but it is also a command. Above all, we are created to love our Creator and receive His love. If we choose to forfeit that love to other things, we will find ourselves endlessly scratching the surface of love, never reaching its full potential or understanding. Obsessing over any love but the Father's will result in us continually peeling off the layers of paint before we see the mural covering each edge of our hearts. Are you obsessed with love or The Love?