[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNWEAt_WDBw’]
Don’t worry if we fall in love
We will never touch the ground
Don’t worry if we fall in love
We will never touch the ground
Just fall into a dreamThey say
If you die in a dream
You die in real life
Well
I just died in your arms
Lost in your eyes
And I know
This must be a dream
Cos I feel
Like I can fly to heavenThey say
If you live in a dream
You’re hopelessly lost
Well
This ain’t just any old dream
For our paths have crossed
And I may be hopelessly lost
But somehow
I’ve managed to find heaven
Oh my goodness this is lovely isn’t it?! This is a brilliant woman; I have become a huge Esperanza Spalding fan. This song is a beautiful expression of some of the common culture surrounding love and romance that I want to look at in light of grace. I hope you listen to her while you read it.
Isn’t it telling that we say that we “fall in” love? There is a sense of surrender, and of entering rest. There is a sense of acknowledging something wonderful that is inevitable, something that is so good that it almost scares us. There is a sense of entering into some destined blessing, that fate and mystery have converged to lead two people into joy. Two people’s paths have crossed, not just by accident, but by fate.
Notice also the idea that entering into love involves a death, but not a sad death, a joyous death. There is the sense that one is lost in something so good it must be a dream, that whatever was happening before, now there is heaven. It is the same air, the same trees, the same car, the same job, the same dishes, but now with this person there is a tremendous sense of joy about things.
This is all about grace. As I’ve said at length elsewhere, love is a command, but it is the one thing we cannot force ourselves to obey. If we enter into romance out of coercion or obligation, it is not really love at all! What woman wants a man to marry her because he thinks he is obligated? She wants a man who has truly fallen for her. When we try to say that love is a choice, that we can choose to love from obedience, we strip love of the grace and mystery and power and destiny and leave the dry lifeless husk of obligatory obedience. This isn’t love, it is law.
In the end, this kind of love, love filled with romance and desire and joy and surrender and feeling lost to everything else, is the sort of love God is looking for in us. This is the kind of love we cannot just turn on and off because it is commanded. Some people in the church may criticize pop culture for pressing these silly ideas about love, but they betray their graceless lifeless loveless souls in stripping their relationships with their spouses and with Christ of beauty and mystery and grandeur.
The commandment to love is a commandment to do something that is really not commandable: it is a commandment to enter into the romance of grace.
8 The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
9 By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him.
10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
12 No one has beheld God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us.
13 By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit.
14 And we have beheld and bear witness that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world.
15 Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.
16 And we have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.
17 By this, love is perfected with us, that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world.
18 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.
19 We love, because He first loved us.
(1 John 4:8-19, NASB).