Living Loved

52 Week Project 2012 ~ 2/52

For my birthday this year, my boyfriend Pat and I celebrated by going to Buca di Peppo for dinner, just the two of us. Before we left, Pat surprised me with this single red rose pictured to the right. Classy, huh? I carried the rose with me into the restaurant, signaling to every turn of the head and every glance of the eye that someone (aka the man next to me who's holding my hand) loved me a lot. After all, everyone knows red roses say, "I love you."

This past week, week 2 of my 52 Week Project, I’ve been thinking a lot about love, but not in the dramatic teenage girl way. Now that I’m 20 years old, I’ve left those childish trains of thought to choo-choo back to where they belong. Wherever that is, I’m not quite sure, but it is certainly not in my head. At least not for now. No, this week I’ve traveled down a curiously winding path of thoughts about what it means to be loved, to feel loved, to live loved.

We all need love; our human souls hunger for it like our stomachs crave food. We want it bad. Many of our decisions even stem from our desire for love. Often times we act one way when we know that someone really loves us, when we feel loved, but other times we act totally different when it feels like no one really cares. Feeling loved, or the lack of love, can significantly affect our mood, self-esteem, eating and sleeping habits; our joy, peace and contentment; our patience, kindness, and generosity. Needless to say, love is important. This we know.

Now, I’m not so sure that love literally makes the world go ‘round, but I do know that Love created this world because the Bible says that God is love. It also directly states, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10). Surely I’ve read that verse many times, but this week, it has unmistakably colored my vision. In our eyes, roses act as a good signal of love, but as a sign of God’s love, roses don’t nearly suffice, for God’s love infinitely exceeds our own. Jesus, instead, is like God’s rose given to us, something we can hold on to, an indicator of how much we are passionately loved by the Creator of the universe.

If we really are loved by God that much, so much so that he would descend from Heaven, live among us, and die in order that we may have life, than we should act differently, right? We should not be ashamed of God's love but rather should put Jesus on display through the manner in which we live. Every turning head and glancing eye that sees us walking through the restaurant, or wherever we may be, ought to recognize God’s great love radiating from our faces. With Jesus as our red rose, our sign of God’s love to us and to the world, we can all rest assured of one thing:

We can live loved, for that is what we are. Loved. Dearly loved children of God. May we start acting like it.