Am I worth someone coming out of their way to meet me just to read a book in the same room I am studying in? Sure, the probable possibility of conversation is there. But, really?

To just want to be around me?

Are any of us worth that?

My answer is an emphatic yes! until I suddenly have to apply the question to myself and then I go, "wait a second, that's kind of... arrogant/absorbed/egotistical..." I'm not that awesome.

How do we conquer wanting to be loved and then not knowing how to handle it if we are? We claim to want to be chosen first, over others, to be someone's beloved over everyone and everything else... but when faced with the reality of being chosen over someone else, my immediate reaction is revulsion. Don't put me first, I don't need to be chosen like that, don't give me that weight, stop, stop, stop.

How can we love sacrificially with abandon and still accept sacrificial love, which we all truly crave?

It's funny, and I almost feel blasphemous to say this, but I feel like knowing how to be loved first, above almost all else, is the one thing that God has never been able to model for me. I know I am sacrificially loved by him. Loved, cherished, adored. Enough to die for. And yet, so are you, and my roommate, and my pastor, my best friend, my boss, my awful next door neighbor, for all that he's drunk, high, or shredding awful metal at the volume of 11 at all hours of the day. The one thing about love I really, truly, do not receive from my beautiful everything, my Jesus dying on the cross for me, is how to be loved more than my next door neighbor. How to be chosen over someone.

I wept bitterly about this to him less than a few months ago. "Lord, I want to be chosen first! I want someone to want me like that. I know you want me. I know you're enough. But right now, I just want to be cherished like that, in a way that only I am, not in the way that all of humanity is. I want you to be enough, I want your unfathomable depths of love to be enough, but right now, honestly? Selfish, probably, definitely, but I just want to be loved as an only, as a first, not as one child unquestionably and equally loved among many. How can that exist if you, the God of the freaking universe, don't love me like that? But how could you, the God of the freaking universe, possibly love me like that?" He does, somehow, paradoxically, I know, love me the most of all things, like he loves you the most of all things (he really does, you know.) 

But I asked him, Lord, Father, I want someone to put me first!

And now I have come face to face with that question, in what a few nights ago I thought was raised theoretically by a out-of-the-blue deeply fantastic movie (HappyThankYouMorePlease) and what a few hours ago became a shockingly real possibility. Can I even accept that if it comes to me? I don't think I want to be loved more than those that I love.

What do we do with this deep desire to be cherished when all we want to do is cherish, adore, develop, and otherwise lavish love?









(Aside. If anyone miraculously reading this thinks they know what this was brought on by, talk to me before drawing any conclusions. Most of this occurred extraordinarily hypothetically in my brain. And that which didn't exists on a loved dramatically as a friend and sister level, at least to my knowledge. Still, even, or even especially, on that level... all applies.)