To be frank, the giving and receiving of love is something that everyone on planet earth needs. Bob the bloodhound knows this, likely better than most people. I can testify that Bob is not shy about making his needs and wants known and letting me know when he wants love in the form of dog food, a walk, or a good old-fashioned pet.
We all require love, in both receiving love, and giving love. But not everyone has a heart open to accepting love, and, so, find it nearly impossible to dispense love. However, the good news is that love is near to each one of us. We only need to reach out and touch it because it is so close.
We have all likely heard the dictum “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” Even if we have not used the phrase, the concept is common throughout the world. Perhaps the chief hindrance to receiving and giving love is this reciprocal notion. It would be weird if I expected Bob to scratch my back right after I give him a good scratch.
Much of Western society turns on the wheels of transactions. This is seen in the many words we have for money and financial exchanges: bills; coins; cash; credit and debit cards; stocks and bonds; bank accounts; 401k; paychecks, etc. You get the idea. We can scarcely imagine a culture without putting something into an account so that we can engage in commerce and consumerism.
None of this is neither inherently bad nor good; it just is. A problem arises, however, when people allow the idea of transactions to seep into relationships. When a person chooses to view the world primarily through the financial lenses of a transaction, we set ourselves up for a deficit of love.
It works something like this: A parent invests time, money, and resources into a child’s life. Mom and Dad do everything they can to set up little Johnny for success in this life (which, by the way, is often defined as getting a good paying job someday and being financially independent). But when little Johnny decides to go all avant-garde and does not live up to his parents’ expectations, their reaction betrays the transactional: “Look at all we did for you, and you repay us by not going to college and running off to do only God knows what!?”
Put in the context of a workplace, some bosses are only happy when the employee is producing and making money. Management doesn’t understand why workers are upset. Paying them more money doesn’t seem to do it. They only see the transactional view of the world. Employers often fail to understand that money and wages cannot fulfill the need for giving and receiving within healthy relationships.
In the realm of personal relationships, we might send a card to someone, and they never sent one back, and that makes us mad. When it comes to God, we went to church, kept our nose clean and were ethical in all our dealings, and now something terrible happens in our lives. We believe that God did not make good on us. We invested in this God thing, and then he didn’t follow through with the transaction to give us the good life we were expecting.
But God operates in a different economy. Grace overwhelms transaction and is the currency of God’s kingdom. Grace is the gears and the grease of God’s love toward us. The good news of Christianity is that God loves us, even when we have nothing to give, and even when we are far from the words and ways of Jesus.
“Christ died for us at a time when we were helpless and sinful. No one is really willing to die for an honest person, though someone might be willing to die for a genuinely good person. But God showed how much he loved us by having Christ die for us, even though we were sinners.” (Romans 5:6-8, CEV)
It is likely that all of us, at some time or another, have felt the sting of someone else’s disappointment with us. They “invested” in us in some way. We “repaid” them with a decision or a different direction than what they expected. Or it went the other way. We put time and effort into someone or a group of people, and they didn’t come through for us (ironically, pastors and church volunteers often feel this way).
The first step in awakening to love is forsaking a transactional view of relationships and adopting a gracious approach to people and to God. God is gracious, merciful, and kind. It isn’t just what God does; it is who God is. God gives love because God is love. Until we get that basic understanding, we will flounder in our human relationships because true love will forever be elusive due to the transactional view. It will throw out of whack the true giving and receiving of love.
Grace is the most effective way to the world of love, and the best way to the good life. Yet, surprisingly, this is at no cost to us. So, what are we to do? We are to give ourselves to God, as people who have been raised from death to life. We are to make every part of our lives an offering to God. Don’t let sin keep ruling your lives because you are ruled by God’s kindness and not by the law of the transaction.
Awaken to love because God is love. (Romans 6:12-14; 1 John 4:8-11)
