Love…believes all things…

How lost we could get in these words, how tragic that they would ever be used to promote a gullible mind, blindness, deafness, and infertile ground to truth. Though I could spend too much time writing about what love is not, I want rather to steep with you in all that it is. So I’ve been watching for words and pictures that would open this world further to us.

Once I’m on the hunt, I rarely need to look far.

My littlest man, Emet, and I got to go on a date this week. There’s so much I wouldn’t know about love if it wasn’t for him. He came when I thought I couldn’t. period. I felt not only done but undone in the most ways I knew possible at that point in life.

Emet means truth and faithfulness in Hebrew. It is where we get our word for amen. I didn’t know that I knew his name for the entire nine months of his growing within me, and that was different from his siblings—when they were within me, I knew that I knew their names. It would only be in retrospect that I would realize I knew his name from the first moment I felt the sting of his miraculous life enter my own. 

It was in that moment I heard the question, “What are you going to do?” and as though his very essence rose into my mouth I spoke it, “I will have faith.” Which was to say, “I will have Emet.”

When I became pregnant with Emet, truth and faithfulness was no longer an idea in my mind, it became a reality in my body, bones, and blood. Everything changed. I had become impregnated with faith, not only mentally animated with it’s potential. Though it would cost me, I was in love.

Emet had became a part of me so that, in time, I would become a part of him. He would be born from my frame and in time walk out into the world bearing my image, but more than that, my very heart—the interior corridors of which had been shaped by his being within me. What a love-story! What an eternal circle of giving and receiving, a place of living waters from beginning to end.

This is love, and has by far become the greatest expression of brother James song to me…faith without works is dead… Love has so much less to do with “salvation by works” and so much more to do with learning the sound of The Name, becoming pregnant with Adonai’s essence, bearing the fruit of the Spirit that is holy, holy, holy.

This love-story we find ourselves in is less about pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps (though there is a time for all the work of stewarding life rich within us) and more about taking off our shoes.

Love’s incessant tendency to “believe” is less about being over trustful and more about knowing we have been believed in, entrusted in, given to, accepted into the body of One who will nurture and tend to our being-ness—birth us. In becoming pregnant with these truths, receiving them into our most inward parts, we just. simply. do. bear His image, walk like Him, talk like Him, love like Him—because it is His very heart that burns within us.

It may only be in retrospect that we will realize how we knew His name from the first moment we felt the sting of His miraculous life enter our own, and that’s alright. Some things take time.

Send out your light and your truth; let them lead me;
let them bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling!
Psalm 43:3

Raynna
P.S. Things I’m contemplating this week: Deuteronomy 1, especially verses 25, 31 & 32 and this quote from Peter Phillip Levertoff in Love and the Messianic Age, “In Messianic times the Holy Land will be called “the land of G-d’s pleasure (Isaiah 62:4). G-d will enter into a spiritual marriage with this land of beauty and fertility…even now this is, in a measure, true of those who have become temples of the divine love; they are the land of G-d’s pleasure.” <heart eyes emoji here>

P.P.S I love to hear from you, in the comments, in an email. Where are you? Thank you for traveling with me! I am growing through this series and I hope you are too. If you missed it you can read last week’s installment here, Flying Through the Night.

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